PHYLOGENETIC RELATIONSHIPS AMONG SOME SPECIES OF THE GENUS CONVOLVULUS (CONVOLVULACEAE) IN KURDISTAN REGION – IRAQ

A molecular systematics analysis was conducted using sequence data of two nuclear ribosomal DNA ITS and 26SrRNA gene for the genus Convolvulus L., by character based phylogenetic methods. The aim of this study was to investigate phylogenetic relationships among the studied species as well as comparing them with other species. Thirty-seven representative representatives of the genus Convolvulus L., of which nine were sequenced and twenty-eight were collected from the NCBI genebank, were included as ingroup, whilst one member of the sibling genus Cressa was used as an outgroup to root the tree. By using maximum parsimony (MP) as implemented in PAUP* and bayesian inference (BI) by using MrBayes methods, intraspecific connections within Convolvulus were deduced. The results from molecular study showed that five major lineages of both regions with the minimum differences in the locations of the species. Its concluded that the maximum parsimony method was found to be the method of choice for establishing intraspecific associations between Convolvulus species using ITS and 26SrRNA data as it clearly defined the connections supported by bootstrap support (BS) values.