The Leucaena website and the data presented were development with support from NSF grant:
EF-0542228

Contact Donovan Bailey, New Mexico State University

For additional information contact: Colin Hughes, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford

Leucaena (Leguminosae - Mimosoideae) is a small genus of 25 species of Neotropical trees.

Leucaena comprises 17 diploid and 5 tetraploid species, six infraspecific taxa, and two named hybrids. They are small to medium-sized trees that grow in seasonally dry tropical forests of Mexico, Central America and northern South America. Species of Leucaena have been the focus of both early indigenous domestication, as a native food plant in Mexico, and modern crop breeding as a fodder tree throughout the tropics. Previous taxonomic work on Leucaena culminated in two major publications - a Taxonomic Monograph of the genus (Hughes, C.E. 1998. Systematic Botany Monographs 55), and a Genetic Resources Handbook (Hughes, C.E. 1998. Tropical Forestry Paper 37 Oxford Forestry Institute). Recent collaborative research on Leucaena in Oxford and New Mexico has focused on understanding hybrid and polyploid origins using molecular data.

Resources

• Images, distribution maps and an online key constructed by Patrick Alexander for the identification of Leucaena species.
• Monograph of Leucaena - to order a copy, contact: Systematic Botany Monographs, University of Michigan, North University Building Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1057, USA. The monograph is also available online via JSTOR.
• Leucaena - Genetic Resources Handbook - a .pdf [in English (TFP37) or in Spanish (TFP37S)] can be downloaded here.
• Online Database - As part of this work a database incorporating species and herbarium specimen information has been assembled, and is available here. Full nomenclature including name status, synonymy and protologues are included in the database and TYPE collections are linked to names. Data from ca 3,000 specimen records from 26 herbaria (A, AAU, BISH, BM, CAS, CR, EAP, F, FHO, G, HAL, HEH, K, LAGU, M, MEXU, MO, NY, OXF, PMA, QAME, TEFH, TEX, UC, US and W) are available along with detailed field notes, common names, phenology and wild/cultivated codes, and duplicate records, and the majority of specimens (2393) have accurate geographical data. Additional data, including images, GenBank links, and morphological and DNA sequence data are currently being added to the database.

Current Research - Gene trees, hybrids and polyploid origins

Despite the high frequency of hybridization and polyploidy in plants, significant challenges remain to disentangle reticulation from divergence in plant phylogenies. Recent collaborative research on Leucaena in Oxford and New Mexico has focused on understanding hybrid and polyploid origins using molecular data and a multi-locus gene tree approach. Studies of reticulation demand multiple, densely sampled, highly resolved and robustly supported biparentally inherited gene trees. Much of the work on Leucaena has been devoted to tackling problems posed by lack of informative variation in conventional DNA sequence loci and the occurrence of nrDNA pseudogenes (Hughes et al., 2002; Bailey et al., 2003, 2004) - issues that hinder reconstruction of robust, well-resolved species-level phylogenies for plants. This has involved one of the first studies to thoroughly explore the impacts of nrDNA polymorphism and non-functional pseudogene sequences on phylogeny reconstruction in plants (Hughes et al., 2002; Bailey et al, 2003) and development of a powerful method for identifying pseudogene sequences using phylogenetic trees and bootstrap hypothesis testing (Bailey et al., 2003). We showed that pseudogene sequences are common in nrDNA datasets, which dominate plant species-level phylogenetics, and that their detection is critical for accurate phylogeny reconstruction. To get around the problem of lack of phylogenetic resolution, we developed a novel SCAR-based technique to identify more rapidly-evolving, biparentally-inherited, nuclear DNA sequence loci that can generate gene trees with the required resolution and support (Bailey et al., 2004). Using one of these loci a number of putative hybrids have been investigated (Hughes et al., 2007). Comprehensive sequence data sets for a larger set of SCAR-based nuclear DNA sequence loci are currently under construction by Govindarajulu Rajanikanth, PhD student working with Donovan Bailey.