Authors: Pierre Gladieux Tatiana Giraud Levente Kiss Benjamin J Genton Odile Jonot Jacqui A Shykoff
Publish Date: 2010/10/02
Volume: 13, Issue: 4, Pages: 933-944
Abstract
The common ragweed Ambrosia artemisiifolia L Asteraceae is a North American native that is invading Eurasia Besides its economic impact on crop yield it presents a major health problem because of its highly allergenic pollen The plant was imported inadvertently to Europe in the eighteenth century and has become invasive in several countries By analyzing French and North American populations it was previously shown that French populations were best described as a mixture of native sources and that range expansion in France probably involved sequential bottlenecks Here our aim was to determine whether Eastern European populations of A artemisiifolia originated from the previously established French populations or from independent transAtlantic colonization events We used nuclear microsatellite markers to elucidate the relationships among populations from Eastern and Western Europe in relation to populations from a broad survey across the native North American range We found that A artemisiifolia from Eastern Europe did not originate from the earlier established French populations but rather represents multiple independent introductions from other sources or introductions from a not yet identified highly diverse native population Eastern European populations show comparable amounts of genetic variability as do previously characterized French and North American populations but analyses of population structure clearly distinguish the two European groups This suggests separate introductions in Eastern and Western Europe as well as divergent sources for these two invasions possibly as a result of distinct rules for trade and exchange for Eastern Europe during most of the twentieth centuryWe are grateful to Tünde Jankovics and Vera Hayova for their help in collecting ragweed samples to Bernard Clot from MeteoSwiss and we thank anonymous reviewers for their suggestions TG acknowledges a grant ANR 07BDIV003 and LK an Invited Professorship from University ParisSud A part of this work was supported by grants of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund OTKA T046841 and IN67377
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