View article

Salinity imposes a significant barrier to the distribution of many organisms, including diatoms. Diatoms are ancestrally marine, and the number of times they have independently colonized fresh waters and the physiological adaptations that facilitated these transitions remain outstanding questions in diatom evolution. The colonization of fresh waters by diatoms has been compared to “crossing the Rubicon,” implying that successful colonization events are rare, irreversible, and lead to substantial species diversification. To test these hypotheses, we reconstructed the phylogeny of Thalassiosirales, a diatom lineage with high diversity in both marine and fresh waters. We collected ∼5.3kb of DNA sequence data from the nuclear (SSU and partial LSU rDNA) and chloroplast genomes (psbC and rbcL) and reconstructed the phylogeny using parsimony and Bayesian methods. Alternative topology tests strongly reject all …