Zaluzianskya
Zaluzianskya is a genus of flowering plants now regarded as being a member of the Scrophulariaceae, the figwort family. The genus includes some described sixty species. Zaluzianskya was named in honour of Adam Zaluziansky von Zaluzian, 1558–1613, a physician of Prague, author of Methodus Herbariae, 1592. Zaluziansky seems to have been a deservedly prominent botanist in his day, with some views on taxonomy quite advanced for his time. Superficially the shape of the flowers is strikingly phlox-like, hence the designation'night phlox', for their evening fragrance; the fragrance after dark suggests that in nature the species in question are pollinated by moths, whereas day-pollinated species have little or no obvious scent. Research is in progress on the ecological and evolutionary relationships between some members of the genus and specialist long-tongued pollinators night flying hawk moths and flies in the families Nemestrinidae and Bombyliidae. Day-flying hawk moths, such as the genus Macroglossum seem to be significant pollinators of many species of Zaluzianskya.
Zaluzianskya species have not been of horticultural significance until recently. Zaluzianskya rubrostellata is cultivated as an annual herbaceous ornamental plant. Species include Zaluzianskya affinis Zaluzianskya capensis Zaluzianskya divaricata Zaluzianskya ovata Zaluzianskya lychnidea Zaluzianskya microsiphon Zaluzianskya pulvinata Zaluzianskya rubrostellata Zaluzianskya villosa Zaluzianskya spathacea
Phylogenetics
In biology, phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among individuals or groups of organisms. These relationships are discovered through phylogenetic inference methods that evaluate observed heritable traits, such as DNA sequences or morphology under a model of evolution of these traits; the result of these analyses is a phylogeny – a diagrammatic hypothesis about the history of the evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms. The tips of a phylogenetic tree can be living organisms or fossils, represent the "end", or the present, in an evolutionary lineage. Phylogenetic analyses have become central to understanding biodiversity, evolution and genomes. Taxonomy is the identification and classification of organisms, it is richly informed by phylogenetics, but remains a methodologically and logically distinct discipline. The degree to which taxonomies depend on phylogenies differs depending on the school of taxonomy: phenetics ignores phylogeny altogether, trying to represent the similarity between organisms instead.
Usual methods of phylogenetic inference involve computational approaches implementing the optimality criteria and methods of parsimony, maximum likelihood, MCMC-based Bayesian inference. All these depend upon an implicit or explicit mathematical model describing the evolution of characters observed. Phenetics, popular in the mid-20th century but now obsolete, used distance matrix-based methods to construct trees based on overall similarity in morphology or other observable traits, assumed to approximate phylogenetic relationships. Prior to 1950, phylogenetic inferences were presented as narrative scenarios; such methods are ambiguous and lack explicit criteria for evaluating alternative hypotheses. The term "phylogeny" derives from the German Phylogenie, introduced by Haeckel in 1866, the Darwinian approach to classification became known as the "phyletic" approach. During the late 19th century, Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory, or "biogenetic fundamental law", was accepted, it was expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", i.e. the development of a single organism during its lifetime, from germ to adult, successively mirrors the adult stages of successive ancestors of the species to which it belongs.
But this theory has long been rejected. Instead, ontogeny evolves – the phylogenetic history of a species cannot be read directly from its ontogeny, as Haeckel thought would be possible, but characters from ontogeny can be used as data for phylogenetic analyses. 14th century, lex parsimoniae, William of Ockam, English philosopher and Franciscan friar, but the idea goes back to Aristotle, precursor concept 1763, Bayesian probability, Rev. Thomas Bayes, precursor concept 18th century, Pierre Simon first to use ML, precursor concept 1809, evolutionary theory, Philosophie Zoologique, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, precursor concept, foreshadowed in the 17th century and 18th century by Voltaire and Leibniz, with Leibniz proposing evolutionary changes to account for observed gaps suggesting that many species had become extinct, others transformed, different species that share common traits may have at one time been a single race foreshadowed by some early Greek philosophers such as Anaximander in the 6th century BC and the atomists of the 5th century BC, who proposed rudimentary theories of evolution 1837, Darwin's notebooks show an evolutionary tree 1843, distinction between homology and analogy, Richard Owen, precursor concept 1858, Paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn published a hypothetical tree to illustrating the paleontological "arrival" of new, similar species following the extinction of an older species.
Bronn did not propose a mechanism responsible for precursor concept. 1858, elaboration of evolutionary theory and Wallace in Origin of Species by Darwin the following year, precursor concept 1866, Ernst Haeckel, first publishes his phylogeny-based evolutionary tree, precursor concept 1893, Dollo's Law of Character State Irreversibility, precursor concept 1912, ML recommended and popularized by Ronald Fisher, precursor concept 1921, Tillyard uses term "phylogenetic" and distinguishes between archaic and specialized characters in his classification system 1940, term "clade" coined by Lucien Cuénot 1949, Jackknife resampling, Maurice Quenouille, precursor concept 1950, Willi Hennig's classic formalization 1952, William Wagner's groundplan divergence method 1953, "cladogenesis" coined 1960, "cladistic" coined by Cain and Harrison 1963, first attempt to use ML for phylogenetics and Cavalli-Sforza 1965 Camin-Sokal parsimony, first parsimony criterion and first computer program/algorithm for cladistic analysis both by Camin and Sokal character compatibility method called clique analysis, introduced independently by Camin and Sokal and E. O. Wilson 1966 English translation of Hennig "cladistics" and "cladogram" coined 1969 dynamic and successive wei
Diascia (plant)
Diascia is a genus of around 70 species of herbaceous annual and perennial flowering plants of the family Scrophulariaceae, native to southern Africa, including South Africa and neighbouring areas. The perennial species are found in summer-rainfall areas such as the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg, their common name is twinspur, in reference to the two spurs to be found on the back of the flower. These help to distinguish them from Nemesia; the spurs contain a special oil, collected in the wild by certain species of bees that appear to have coevolved with the plants, as they have unusually long forelegs for collecting the oil. In gardens, Diascia cultivars have become popular as colourful, floriferous grown bedding plants in recent years; the generic name does not refer to the spurs, but to the two translucent sacs, or pouches, known as'windows', found in the upper part of the corolla of the original type specimen, Diascia bergiana. Diascia species in the section Racemosae have similar windows, but in some species they merge into one.
The windows may help oil-collecting bees to find the correct position within the corolla when gathering oil from the glands within the spurs. Most diascia species are short-growing, straggling plants, reaching no more than 30–45 centimetres in height, although Diascia rigescens can reach 60 cm, the rather similar D. personata up to 120 cm or so. Some Diascia species spread by means of stolons, while others produce multiple lax stems from a single crown; the flowers are borne in loose terminal racemes. The corolla is five-lobed, pink or rose-coloured in the perennial species most seen in cultivation. Dark purplish patches of oil glands may make the flowers of some species appear bicoloured. Around 60–70 species are recognised in the genus Diascia: The two spurs found on the back of a Diascia flower contain a special oil, collected in the wild by at least 8 species of bees of the genus Rediviva; the bees appear to have coevolved with the plants, as the females have developed unusually long, hairy forelegs with which they collect the oil from Diascia spurs to feed their larvae.
The spurs vary in average length from 5.3 millimetres to as much as 13.9 mm between species. The spurs of Diascia longicornis are about 25 mm in length, but the existence of a suitably equipped pollinator, Rediviva emdeorum, with forelegs of the same length, was only confirmed in the 1980s. Rediviva longimanus has been observed pollinating D. longicornis in the Western Cape. Rediviva neliana, a widespread species, collects from at least 12 species of Diascia, but in general, few different Diascia species grow together in the same locality; as a result, local populations of R. neliana have been found to differ from each other, as each has developed legs that match the spur length of the diascias that are available to them in that locality. This indicates that local populations of R. neliana are coevolving with the flowers on which they depend. Diascia cultivars have become popular worldwide as bedding plants, suitable for hanging baskets, window boxes and other containers, as well as rockeries and the fronts of herbaceous borders.
This explosion of interest is thanks to the breeding work done by the late Hector Harrison of Appleby, North Lincolnshire, England. From 1985, he raised hundreds of hybrid seedlings, from which several excellent cultivars have been selected and named, he increased the colour range to include shades of apricot, coral, lilac and white. Other nurseries and breeders have continued to build on his pioneering work. Several species and cultivars have been given the Award of Garden Merit by the British Royal Horticultural Society; the AGM includes a hardiness rating: most have been rated as intermediate between H3 and H4. The species and cultivars grown in gardens include the following: Plantzafrica Diascia integerrima Plantzafrica Diascia rigescens A UK National Plant Collection holder's website
Sophronanthe
Sophronanthe is a small genus of flowering plants in the Veronica family. The two included; these species were included in the genus Gratiola, but a study in 2008 showed that there are four distinct groups within Gratiola and resurrected the genus Sophronanthe. There are two included species: Sophronanthe hispida Bentham ex Lindley – pineland hedge-hyssop Sophronanthe pilosa Small – shaggy hedge-hyssop
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu was a French botanist, notable as the first to publish a natural classification of flowering plants. His classification was based on an extended unpublished work by his uncle, the botanist Bernard de Jussieu. Jussieu was born in Lyon, he went to Paris to study medicine, graduating in 1770. He was professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes from 1770 to 1826, his son Adrien-Henri became a botanist. In his study of flowering plants, Genera plantarum, Jussieu adopted a methodology based on the use of multiple characters to define groups, an idea derived from naturalist Michel Adanson; this was a significant improvement over the "artificial" system of Linnaeus, whose most popular work classified plants into classes and orders based on the number of stamens and pistils. Jussieu did keep Linnaeus' binomial nomenclature, resulting in a work, far-reaching in its impact. Morton's 1981 History of botanical science counts 76 of Jussieu's families conserved in the ICBN, versus just 11 for Linnaeus, for instance.
Writing of the natural system, Sydney Howard Vines remarked "The glory of this crowning achievement belongs to Jussieu: he was the capable man who appeared at the psychological moment, it is the men that so appear who have made, will continue to make, all the great generalisations of science." In 1788, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was a member of Les Neuf Sœurs; the system of suprageneric nomenclature in botany is dated to 4 Aug 1789 with the publication of the Genera Plantarum. De Jussieu system
Lamiales
The Lamiales are an order in the asterid group of dicotyledonous flowering plants. It includes about 23,810 species, 1,059 genera, is divided into about 24 families. Well-known or economically important members of this order include lavender, olive, the ash tree, snapdragon, psyllium, garden sage, a number of table herbs such as mint and rosemary. Although exceptions occur, species in this order have the following characteristics: superior ovary composed of two fused carpels four petals fused into a tube bilaterally symmetrical bilabiate corollas four fertile stamens opposite leaves The Lamiales had a restricted circumscription that included the major families Lamiaceae and Boraginaceae, plus a few smaller families. In the classification system of Dahlgren the Lamiales were in the superorder Lamiiflorae. Recent phylogenetic work has shown the Lamiales are polyphyletic with respect to order Scrophulariales and the two groups are now combined in a single order that includes the former orders Hippuridales and Plantaginales.
Lamiales has become the preferred name for this much larger combined group. The placement of the Boraginaceae is unclear, but phylogenetic work shows this family does not belong in Lamiales; the circumscription of family Scrophulariaceae a paraphyletic group defined by plesiomorphic characters and from within which numerous other families of the Lamiales were derived, has been radically altered to create a number of smaller, better-defined, putatively monophyletic families. Much research has been conducted in recent years regarding the dating the Lamiales lineage, although there still remains some ambiguity. A 2004 study, on the molecular phylogenetic dating of asterid flowering plants, estimated 106 million years for the stem lineage of Lamiales. A 2009 study on angiosperm diversification through time, concluded an inferred age of lower Eocene, ca. 50 MY, for Lamiales. Lamiales A parsimony analysis of the Asteridae sensu lato based on rbcL sequences Disintegration of the Scrophulariaceae L. Watson and M.
J. Dallwitz; the families of flowering plants: descriptions, identification, information retrieval. Http://delta-intkey.com http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/vascular/acanth.htm 2002-09-06 http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/d52/52e.htm 2002-09-06 http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/d52/52efam.htm 2002-09-06 http://www.science.siu.edu/parasitic-plants/Relation-Scroph.html http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/web.dbs/genlist.html 2002-09-06
Plant
Plants are multicellular, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Plants were treated as one of two kingdoms including all living things that were not animals, all algae and fungi were treated as plants. However, all current definitions of Plantae exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as the prokaryotes. By one definition, plants form the clade Viridiplantae, a group that includes the flowering plants and other gymnosperms and their allies, liverworts and the green algae, but excludes the red and brown algae. Green plants obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts that are derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria, their chloroplasts contain b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic or mycotrophic and have lost the ability to produce normal amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are characterized by sexual reproduction and alternation of generations, although asexual reproduction is common.
There are about 320 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260–290 thousand, are seed plants. Green plants provide a substantial proportion of the world's molecular oxygen and are the basis of most of Earth's ecosystems on land. Plants that produce grain and vegetables form humankind's basic foods, have been domesticated for millennia. Plants have many cultural and other uses, as ornaments, building materials, writing material and, in great variety, they have been the source of medicines and psychoactive drugs; the scientific study of plants is known as a branch of biology. All living things were traditionally placed into one of two groups and animals; this classification may date from Aristotle, who made the distincton between plants, which do not move, animals, which are mobile to catch their food. Much when Linnaeus created the basis of the modern system of scientific classification, these two groups became the kingdoms Vegetabilia and Animalia. Since it has become clear that the plant kingdom as defined included several unrelated groups, the fungi and several groups of algae were removed to new kingdoms.
However, these organisms are still considered plants in popular contexts. The term "plant" implies the possession of the following traits multicellularity, possession of cell walls containing cellulose and the ability to carry out photosynthesis with primary chloroplasts; when the name Plantae or plant is applied to a specific group of organisms or taxon, it refers to one of four concepts. From least to most inclusive, these four groupings are: Another way of looking at the relationships between the different groups that have been called "plants" is through a cladogram, which shows their evolutionary relationships; these are not yet settled, but one accepted relationship between the three groups described above is shown below. Those which have been called "plants" are in bold; the way in which the groups of green algae are combined and named varies between authors. Algae comprise several different groups of organisms which produce food by photosynthesis and thus have traditionally been included in the plant kingdom.
The seaweeds range from large multicellular algae to single-celled organisms and are classified into three groups, the green algae, red algae and brown algae. There is good evidence that the brown algae evolved independently from the others, from non-photosynthetic ancestors that formed endosymbiotic relationships with red algae rather than from cyanobacteria, they are no longer classified as plants as defined here; the Viridiplantae, the green plants – green algae and land plants – form a clade, a group consisting of all the descendants of a common ancestor. With a few exceptions, the green plants have the following features in common, they undergo closed mitosis without centrioles, have mitochondria with flat cristae. The chloroplasts of green plants are surrounded by two membranes, suggesting they originated directly from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria. Two additional groups, the Rhodophyta and Glaucophyta have primary chloroplasts that appear to be derived directly from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria, although they differ from Viridiplantae in the pigments which are used in photosynthesis and so are different in colour.
These groups differ from green plants in that the storage polysaccharide is floridean starch and is stored in the cytoplasm rather than in the plastids. They appear to have had a common origin with Viridiplantae and the three groups form the clade Archaeplastida, whose name implies that their chloroplasts were derived from a single ancient endosymbiotic event; this is the broadest modern definition of the term'plant'. In contrast, most other algae not only have different pigments but have chloroplasts with three or four surrounding membranes, they are not close relatives of the Archaeplastida having acquired chloroplasts separately from ingested or symbiotic green and red algae. They are thus not included in the broadest modern definition of the plant kingdom, although they were in the past; the green plants or Viridiplantae were traditionally divided into the green algae (including
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