Genetic evidence supports the new anatolian lupine accession, Lupinus anatolicus, as an old world "rough-seeded" lupine (section Scabrispermae) related to L-pilosus

A noteworthy wild lupine accession was recently discovered in southwestern Turkey and was proposed as a new separate Old World "smooth-seeded" species close to L. micranthus and named L anatolicus. Its species status was controversial with respect to cytological and crossability data. In order to examine the position and the evolutionary relationships of this Anatolian accession relative to the Old World lupines, we investigated new data from seed coat micromorphology, and from internal transcribed spacer (ITS) nucleotide sequences of the nuclear ribosomal DNA repeat. The micromorphological seed coat pattern of L. anatolicus, as revealed by scanning electron microscopy, is characterized by pluricellular tubercles, which represent the typical and unique pattern of the Old World "rough-seeded" lupines (sect. Scabrispermae). In accordance with the micromorphological results, the genetic distances and phylogenetic relationships among the Old World lupines, estimated from ITS data, unambiguously support the new Anatolian lupine accession as part of the L. pilosus-L. palaestinus lineage within the strongly monophyletic group containing all the Scabrispermae. The results provided in this study, together with other lines of data available from the literature, are thus hardly compatible with the hypothesis that this new Anatolian lupine accession could be related to Old World "smooth-seeded" lupines (including L. micranthus); instead, it appears closely related to L. pilosus.