Patterns of nucleotide variation and linkage disequilibrium will be compared among distantly and closely related
Quercus species to infer gene flow. Homologous regions across fourteen loci from anonymous cosmid clones will
be compared. Additional variation of the whole chloroplast genome will be surveyed to determine if the high gene
flow observed for this genome compared to the nuclear genome is an artefact of sample size. Coalescent based
methods will be used to infer the history of speciation and gene flow from these data especially to compare
hypotheses of ongoing gene flow to models of isolation.