Phylogenomic analyses of Camellia support reticulate evolution among major clades

Camellia (Theaceae) is a morphologically highly diverse genus of flowering plants and includes many famous species with high economic value, and the phylogeny of this genus is not fully resolved. We used 95 transcriptomes from 87 Camellia species and identified 1481 low-copy genes to conduct a detailed analysis of the phylogeny of this genus according to various data-screening criteria. The results show that, very different from the two existing classification systems of Camellia, 87 species are grouped into 8 main clades and two independent species, and that all 8 clades except Clade 8 were strongly supported by almost all the coalescent or concatenated trees using different gene subsets. However, the relationships among these clades were weakly supported and different from analyses using different gene subsets; furthermore, they do not agree with the phylogeny from chloroplast genomes of Camellia. Additional analyses support reticulate evolution (probably resulting from introgression or hybridization) among some major Camellia lineages, providing explanation for extensive gene tree conflicts. Furthermore, we inferred that together with the formation of East Asian subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forests, Camellia underwent a radiative divergence of major clades at 23 ∼ 19 Ma in the late Miocene then had a subsequent species burst at 10 ∼ 5 Ma. Principal component and cluster analyses provides new insights into morphological changes underlying the evolution of Camellia and a reference to further clarify subgenus and sections of this genus. The comprehensive study here including a nuclear phylogeny and other analyses reveal the rapid evolutionary history of Camellia.