Ure above freezing (Hedberg,).Flowers of L.telekii are concealed amongst long, hairy bracts, which can buffer vigorous each day temperature fluctuations in hostile alpine environment (Hedberg,).These options were not observed in the mountain forest species like L.aberdarica.The progressive adaptation of giant lobelias to afroalpine circumstances may happen to be facilitated by comprehensive volcanism through making new habitats (Hedberg,), and by induced mutations in flower buds via radiant heatFIGURE Distribution and pictures of giant lobelias.(A) Generalized distribution on Mt Kenya along altitude and moisture [modified from Knox and Palmer].Lobelia gregoriana was treated as L.deckenii subsp.keniensis in Thulin .(B) Lobelia aberdarica (left), photographed at Aberdare Mountains (Kenya), alt.c.m (photo LingYun Chen); L.telekii (ideal), photographed at Mt Kenya (Kenya), alt.c.m (photo LingYun Chen).Frontiers in Plant Science www.frontiersin.orgApril Volume ArticleZhao et al.Adaptive Evolution of African Giant Lobeliasshocks (Pettersson,).While prior functions shed light on understanding the adaptive evolution of giant lobelias to different altitudes (Hedberg, , , , , Beck et al Knox and Kowal, Knox and Palmer,), the genes that could be involved within the adaptation stay unknown.Acquisition of advantageous mutations by optimistic selection has been associated with adaptation to differentiated environments (Clark et al Zhang et al Poppe et al).Negative (purifying) selection plays important roles in keeping the stability of biological structures by removal of alleles that happen to be deleterious (Loewe,).Positive and unfavorable choice is usually inferred by estimating the ratio of nonsynonymous substitution rate to synonymous substitution rate (dNdS, equivalent to) (Yang,).Facilitated by next generation sequencing technologies, the genetic basis of human and animal adaptation to distinct altitudes has been largely investigated by genome Food Yellow 3 Biological Activity comparison (Yi et al) and assessing the selective stress of orthologous genes (Simonson et al Qiu et al Qu et al).Even so, the genetic basis of plant adaptation to distinct altitudes has been poorly studied (but see Chapman et al Zhang et al).Zhang et al. compared the RNAseq data of Primula poissonii and P.wilsonii.Nonetheless, the distribution altitudes from the two species are similar (eFlora of China).As a part of a suite of works to explore the molecular mechanism of plant adaptation to high altitude, we here generated RNAseq information for L.aberdarica and its closest alpine relative L.telekii (Knox and Palmer, Chen et al), and tested the selective stress in orthologs in the two species.Our aims had been to enhance the limited genetic sources of African mountain plants, and identify candidate genes involved in adaptation to unique altitudes by analyzing functions of the positively selected genes (PSGs) and environmental differences of the two species.electrophoresis.Double stranded cDNA was sequenced applying the Illumina HiSeqTM sequencer ( bp pairedend) in Beijing Genomics Institute (Wuhan, China) following the methodology in Chen et al..Assembling and Functional AnnotationRaw reads were cleaned by removing PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21542721 adaptor sequences, reads with unknown base calls (N) much more than , and low excellent reads (in the bases having a excellent score) employing Filter_fq (an internal system of Beijing Genomics Institute).De novo assembly was carried out with the program Trinity v.(Grabherr et al).Contigs had been assembled to unigenes by T.