Abstract
Relationships within the family Phytolaccaceae sensu lato were examined based on internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences of nuclear ribosomal DNA (nrDNA). The study revealed Phytolacca L. as taxonomically the most difficult genus in the family with completely unknown phylogeny. Molecular evidence was used from nrDNA ITS sequences of about 90% of the species for maximum parsimony analyses, and the molecular phylogenetic analyses defined a monophyletic Phytolacca. This first molecular phylogenetic study of Phytolacca concludes that the relationships among the species within the genus do not show harmony with the generic classification based on morphology. These results set the stage for a more detailed phylogenetic analysis of Phytolacca.Bangladesh J. Plant Taxon. 22(1): 18, 2015 (June)
Highlights
The angiosperm family Phytolaccaceae sensu lato comprises a weedy, and polyphyletic genera (APGIII, 2009) of largely tropical and subtropical plants that have been placed, almost without exception, in Centrospermae under either the order Chenopodiales or Caryophyllales (Nowicke, 1969)
The active principles have been found in methanolic extracts of fruit of P. tetramera Hauman, which is a source of saponins with fungicidal action (Escalante et al, 2002; Santecchia et al, 2002)
The Maximum Parsimony (MP) analysis was performed with the following settings: heuristic search algorithms with tree bisection reconnecting (TBR) branch swapping, MULPARS in effect, all characters weighted, gap treated as missing characters, zero-length branches collapsed, random addition sequence set to 1000 replicates, and branch swapping limited to 10,000,000 rearrangements per replicate
Summary
The angiosperm family Phytolaccaceae sensu lato comprises a weedy, and polyphyletic genera (APGIII, 2009) of largely tropical and subtropical plants that have been placed, almost without exception, in Centrospermae under either the order Chenopodiales or Caryophyllales (Nowicke, 1969). The nrDNA ITS sequences have, provided a useful source of phylogenetic information in many genera and families of flowering as well as non-flowering plants (Ali et al, 2015), including Phytolaccaceae (Lee et al, 2013). As such the nrDNA ITS are appropriate to analyze for the genus Phytolacca too.
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