The plant genus Boechera (Böcher’s rock cress; tribe Boechereae, family Brassicaceae), which is closely related to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, comprises c. 110 species that are distributed southward from Alaska through most of North America and extending eastward to Greenland, with two species in the Russian Far East. As the genus Boechera is characterized by naturally-occurring diploid sexual and diploid apomictic forms, it represents an ideal model system for comparing sexual and apomictic reproduction at the genetic, cytogenetic, embryological and molecular levels. Phylogenetic trees play an invaluable role in understanding the relationships within the investigated group, and both navigating and interpreting other analyses. Despite previous research efforts, a robust well-supported phylogenetic study based on a complete taxon sampling of the genus Boechera and the tribe Boechereae is missing.

The aim of this thesis is to create robust phylogenetic hypotheses, to resolve the intrageneric relationships in Boechera, to infer intratribal topology of the Boechereae, and to estimate the divergence time. Plastomes will be de novo assembled and annotated in c. 100 Boechereae taxa. Maternal phylogeny of the tribe based on complete plastome genomes will be inferred.