Polyploid phylogenetics

Polyploidy is a dominant feature of extant plant diversity. However, major research questions, including whether polyploidy is important to long-term evolution or is just 'evolutionary noise', remain unresolved due to difficulties associated with the generation and analysis of data from polyploid lineages. Many of these difficulties have been recently overcome, such that it is now often relatively straightforward to infer the full and often reticulate phylogenetic history of groups with recently formed polyploids. This nascent field of 'polyploid phylogenetics' allows researchers to tackle long-standing questions of polyploid macroevolution, supplies the foundation for mechanistic models of ploidy change, and provides the opportunity to include a more complete and representative sample of plant taxa in our analyses in general.