Background

Abies koreana E. H. Wilson is an endangered evergreen coniferous tree that is native to high altitudes in South Korea and susceptible to the effects of climate change. Hybridization and reticulate evolution have been reported in the genus; therefore, multigene datasets from nuclear and cytoplasmic genomes are needed to better understand its evolutionary history.

Results

Using Illumina NovaSeq6000 and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) PromethION platforms, we generated complete mitochondrial (1,174,803 bp) and plastid (121,341 bp) genomes from A. koreana. The mitochondrial genome is highly dynamic, transitioning from cis- to trans-splicing and breaking the conserved gene clusters. In the case of the plastome, the ONT reads revealed two structural conformations of A. koreana. The short inverted repeats (1,186 bp) of the A. koreana plastome are associated with the different structural types. Transcriptomic sequencing revealed 1,356 sites of C-to-U RNA editing in the 41 mitochondrial genes. Using A. koreana as a reference, we additionally produced nuclear ribosomal DNA and organelle genomic sequences from eight Abies species and generated multiple datasets for maximum likelihood and network analyses. Three sections (Balsamea, Momi, and Pseudopicea) were well grouped in the nuclear phylogeny, but the phylogenomic relationships showed conflicting signals in the mitochondrial and plastid genomes, indicating a complicated evolutionary history that may have included introgressive hybridization.

Conclusions

These results illustrate that phylogenomic analyses based on the sequences from differently inherited organelle genomes resulted in conflicting trees. Organellar capture, organellar genome recombination, and incomplete lineage sorting in an ancestral heteroplasmic individual can contribute to phylogenomic discordance. We provide strong support for the relationships within Abies and new insights into the phylogenomic complexity of this genus.