Objective Major climatic changes during the Pleistocene and early Holocene influenced the contemporary plant diversity in Europe the most. In that time of advancement and retreat of glaciers, many types of new habitats appeared and disappeared accompanied by massive migration, fragmentation and extinction of populations. The southerly situated European regions are supposed to be glacial refugia of many arcto-alpine plant taxa during glaciations and after the last retreat of glaciers served as genetic pool for northwa rds migration. At the same time, Pleistocene refugia are regarded as places with higher inter-specific diversity, but also by intraspecific diversity or hot spots of biodiversity. European arcto-alpine flora is distributed in two major and during the last Holocene isolated arelas: the northern parts of Fennoscandinavia and adjacent parts of northern hemisphere; and the high mountain ranges of continental Europe. Thus, the species with the disjunctive range of distribution may serve as an interesting model f or study of genetic diversity and historical biogeography. Our specific objective is to search for phylogeographic patterns of perennial arcto-alpine species Hieracium alpinum L. (Asteraceae) in a whole part of its range, covering Alps, Carpathians, Sudete n, Harz, Vosges, Fennoscandinavia, Scotland, Island, Greenland and Murmansk Region. Special attention will be paid to the determination of putative glacial refugia and to the migration routes. In order to accomplish our aim, we will use the single nucleoti d polymorphism (SNP) of non-coding regions of chloroplast DNA and amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) as tools for measurement of genetic diversity. The proposed molecular project will be among the first to investigate general biogeographic patte rns of arcto-alpine plants and provide population genetic data from ca 100 populations on the large geographic scale of Europe covering a whole range of species. Fields of science natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsDNAnatural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystemsnatural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographyglaciology Keywords AFLP Asteraceae Hieracium SNP climate change cpDNA glacial refugia intraspecific genetic variation migration routes postglacial colonization Programme(s) FP6-MOBILITY - Human resources and Mobility in the specific programme for research, technological development and demonstration "Structuring the European Research Area" under the Sixth Framework Programme 2002-2006 Topic(s) MOBILITY-2.1 - Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships (EIF) Call for proposal FP6-2002-MOBILITY-5 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European Fellowships Coordinator UNIVERSITE JOSEPH FOURIER GRENOBLE 1 EU contribution No data Address - GRENOBLE France See on map Links Website Opens in new window Total cost No data