DOI: 10.5061/dryad.bzkh189gc
title: Two new species of Aphyllon from northeastern Mexico: Sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees

description: Plants originally identified as Aphyllon ludovicianum that occur near
 Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, and Cuatro Ciénegas Bolson, Coahuila, Mexico, were
 found to not align with the protologue of that species, the close relative
 A. multiflorum, or any other species of Aphyllon. Following a detailed
 study of floral morphology, geographic range, host species, and
 phylogenetic position using dry herbarium specimens, field study and
 georeferenced color photographs, we propose the new binomials Aphyllon
 spectabile for the plants from Nuevo Leon and Aphyllon gypsophilum for the
 plants from Coahuila, Mexico. This increases the taxonomic diversity of
 Aphyllon to 27 species plus ten additional subspecies. Gymnosperma
 glutinosum and two species of Xanthisma were reported for the first time
 as a host species for the genus Aphyllon. We also provide an updated key
 to Aphyllon in Mexico. 
description: Most data was obtained from previously published DNA sequences
 (Schneider et al. 2016), however a few new samples were added as follows: DNA was extracted using a DNeasy Plant Pro kit, genes of interest amplified using polymerase chain reaction using primers and methods from Schneider et al. 2016. Dideoxy (Sanger) sequencing was performed in forward and reverse directions. Raw sequence chromatograms were inspected for quality and trimmed, then aligned with existing nuclear ribosomal and concatenated plastid sequence alignments from Schneider et al. (2016) using the MUSCLE plugin for Geneious 9.1.8. 
description: # Two new species of *Aphyllon* from northeastern Mexico: Sequence
 alignments and phylogenetic trees
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bzkh189gc](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bzkh189gc) ## Description of the data and file structure *Aphyllon* sequence data stored as a FASTA sequence alignment, a text-based format, in two files: **ludo_clade_cpDNA_2023_08_22.fasta** – Three concatenated plastid genes from 38 samples. **ludo_clade_nrDNA_2023_08_22.fasta** – Concatenated internal and external transcribed spacers of the nuclear ribosomal cistron (ITS and ETS) from 40 samples. FASTA files contain one or more sequences begins with a greater-than character ("&gt;") followed by a description of the sequence (all in a single line). The next line immediately following the description line is the sequence representation, with one letter per nucleic acid (A, T, C, G) , or inferred gap (–). Positions in which the nucleic acid is uncertain are represented by several other letters. Phylogenetic trees of the *Aphyllon ludovicianum* complex inferred using maximum likelihiood stored in Newick format, a text-based format, with nodes labels with bootstrap support. Tip names include the binomial followed by the collector/collection number and herbarium/accession number of the original sample, if available. **ludo_clade_cpDNA_2023-08-22.tre** **ludo_clade_nrDNA_2023-08-22.tre** ## Sharing/Access information Individual sequences are also available on GenBank: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/)