Phylogeny and taxonomy of the Asteraceae

Summary

The sunflower family (Asteraceae) is one of the most species rich groups of flowering plants, with a worldwide distribution and with adaptations to almost all kinds of environments. The family has been subdivided into several tribes, some of which have been studied in this project over a number of years. We mainly focused to disentangle the evolutionary history of various groups in the family, and to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships among species and genera. New insights have been gained at generic and tribal level, and circumscriptions of many groups have been revised. DNA sequence data from the plastid gene ndhF has proven particularly useful for entangling relationships in the Asteraceae, especially where morphological characters have been much reduced, or highly homoplasious. Different studies in the project have focused on the diversification and biogeography, constraints or sexual allocation, taxonomic implications of monophyly, character evolution, etc. The present work focuses on one clade of the Inuleae-Plucheinae. We discovered a new, isolated and undescribed plant genus from China and now investigate its systematic position. In many cases the current view of relationships has been shown to be erroneous, and many relationships entirely misunderstood, thus urging for generic realignments and recognition of new genera and tribes. Investigation of floral micro-characters is often of great value for discriminating between superficially similar species, and genera. One example of this is a species complex where dissection and investigation of the Linnaean type specimen in London was essential, which was recently granted in order to clarify matters of species identity.

Project Participants at the Museum

Arne A. Anderberg (principal investigator)

Annika Bengtson (researcher)

External Project Participants

Gothenburg University, Sweden

National Bioinformatics Infrastructue

Missouri Botanical Garden, USA

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain

University of Salamanca, Spain

University of Delhi, India

Florida International University, USA