Revisiting Ancient Polyploidy in Leptosporangiate Ferns

Ferns, and particularly homosporous ferns, have long been assumed to have experienced recurrent whole-genome duplication (WGD) events because of their substantially large genome sizes, surprisingly high chromosome numbers, and high degrees of polyploidy among many extant members. Although, consequently, the number of sequenced fern genomes is very limited, recent studies using transcriptome data to find evidence for WGDs in ferns reached conflicting results concerning the occurrence of ancient polyploidy, for instance, in the lineage of leptosporangiate ferns. Because identifying WGDs in a phylogenetic context is the foremost step in studying the contribution of ancient polyploidy to evolution, we revisited earlier identified WGDs in leptosporangiate ferns, mainly the core leptosporangiate ferns, by building age distributions and applying substitution rate corrections and by conducting statistical gene tree – species tree reconciliation analyses. Our integrative analyses confidently identified four ancient WGDs in the sampled core leptosporangiates and suggest both false positives and false negatives for the WGDs that recent studies have reported earlier. In conclusion, we underscore the significance of substitution rate corrections and uncertainties in gene tree – species tree reconciliations in calling WGD events, and that failing to do so likely leads to incorrect conclusions.