Phylogeny of Cucumis based on isozyme variability and its comparison with plastome phylogeny

An electrophoretic comparison of 29 nuclear-coded enzymes was carried out for 21 Cucumis species, and a phylogeny based on pairwise measurements of the respective genetic distances was computed. This phylogeny was compared to the one based on chlDNA cariation (Perl-Treves and Galun 1985). The two phylogenies were found to share the main dendrogram features; they also agree well with most taxonomic data available on Cucumis. Accordingly, most of the African Cucumis species form a close group ("Anguria group" - "Group A"), which is distant from the melon (C. melo), and from a few other distinct species, all of which are far apart from each other. The cucumber (C. sativus) is the most distant species within the genus. Some specific taxonomic implications as well as some general evolutionary problems related to such a parallel investigation of the nuclear genome and the plastome are evaluated.