Desmarestia herbacea subsp. firma (C. Agardh) A.F. Peters, E.C. Yang, F.C. Küpper, & Prud’Homme van Reine comb. nov. Basionym and early description: Sporochnus herbacea var. firma C. Agardh (1824) in Systema Algarum, p. 261. Desmarestia herbacea subsp. peruviana (Montagne) A.F. Peters, E.C. Yang, selleck products F.C. Küpper, & Prud’Homme van Reine

comb. nov. Basionym and early description: Desmarestia peruviana Montagne (1839) in Plantes Cellulares, Algae, Florula Boliviensis stirpes novae et minus cognitae in: d’Orbigny, A. (ed.): Voyage dans l’Amérique Méruidionale Vol. 7, Botanique (2): p. 35, pl. 5, fig. 3. In this study, cox1 pairwise distance values for Desmarestiales within species and between species, ranged from 0% to 1.2% and >2.4% respectively. These values were comparable to 29 species from 20 genera of phaeophycean taxa reported by McDevit and Saunders (2009) at 0%–0.46% and >3% respectively. Desmarestiales sequence diversity was similar to those of Laminaria (0%–0.5%, >2.9%) and Saccharina (0%–1.2% and >2.1%). The only anomalous patterns in genetic diversity

were Macrocystis integrifolia and M. pyrifera, which Daporinad mw had overlapping intra and interspecies ranges, compared to other Laminariales. Recent results have indicated these species should in fact be reduced to the one M. pyrifera (Demes et al. 2009, Macaya and Zuccarello 2010). Our results indicate that cox1 is an excellent barcode marker for Desmarestiales, predicting almost all of the species groups of the multigene phylogenetic analysis. Desmarestia japonica had over four times larger sequence divergence compared to all other Desmarestia species and therefore warrants placement in a different species group and confirms results of systematic studies. ITS barcoding correctly identified species grouping, although with much less resolution than cox1 as genetic distances were smaller with greater than 1.0% PWD separating

species. However, the ITS marker crucially lacks resolution and there is only 0.2% separating species and genus. The genetic distances for Desmarestia ITS barcodes were similar to those of Saccharina latissima and Laminariales, whose species cut-off was greater than 1% (McDevit and Saunders 2010). The lack of species/genus separation was also observed for S. latissima (Linnaeus) C.E. Lane, C. Mayes, Druehl et G.W. Saunders, where the biogeographical MCE boundaries established using cox1-barcodes had collapsed using ITS-barcodes, with the authors speculating introgression as the cause (McDevit and Saunders 2010). It is possible that a lack of resolution in the ITS barcodes of Desmarestiales have occurred for similar reasons. For example D. japonica, a separate species, showed partial species level affinity with some but not all members of the unbranched to little-branched Desmarestiales, a sister taxon to the monophyletic D. ligulata group. By contrast, the same Japanese specimen showed less similarity to the D. ligulata group.