Molecular evolutionary history of ancient aquatic angiosperms

Aquatic plants are notoriously difficult to study systematically due to convergent evolution and reductionary processes that result in confusing arrays of morphological features. Plant systematists have frequently focused their attention on the "water lilies," putative descendants of the most archaic angiosperms. Classification of these 10 plant genera varies from recognition of one to three orders containing three to six families. We have used DNA sequence analysis as a means of overcoming many problems inherent in morphologically based studies of the group. Phylogenetic analyses of sequence data obtained from a 1.2-kilobase portion of the chloroplast gene rbcL provide compelling evidence for the recognition of three distinct lineages of "water lily" plants. Molecular phylogenies including woody Magnoliidae sequences and sequences of these aquatic plants depict Ceratophyllum as an early diverging genus. Our results support hypotheses that most taxonomic concepts of the order Nymphaeales reflect polyphyletic groups and that the unusual genus Ceratophyllum represents descendants of some of the earliest angiosperms.