TITLE	Origin of the cyathium-bearing Euphorbieae (Euphorbiaceae): phylogenetic study based on morphological characters
AUTHOR	Ki-Ryong Park Department of Biology, Kyung-Nam University, Masan 631-701, Korea Anders Backlund Division of Pharmacognosy, Department of Pharmacy, Uppsala University, BMC-Biomedical center, S-751 23 Uppsala, Sweden
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ABSTRACT	A cladistic analysis of the subfamily Euphorbioideae was undertaken to elucidate the origin of the cyathium-bearing Euphorbieae and to provide hypotheses about evolutionary relationships within the subfamily. Twenty-one species representing most of the genera within the study group and three outgroup taxa from the subfamilies Acalyphoideae and Crotonoideae were selected for parsimony analysis. An unweighted parsimony analysis of 24 morphological characters resulted in five equally parsimonious trees with consistency indices of 0.67 and tree lengths of 39 steps. The strict consensus tree supported monophyly of the cyathium-bearing Euphorbieae. The sister group relationships of cyathium bearing Euphorbieae with Maprounea (subtribe Hippomaninae) were supported weakly, and the origin of cyathium is possibly in Hippomaneae, or in the common ancestor of Euphorbieae and remaining taxa of Euphorbioideae plus Acalyphoideae. Within the tribe Euphorbieae, both subtribes Euphorbiinae and Neoguilauminiinae are monophyletic, but the African endemic subtribe Anthosteminae is unresolved. The resulting trees support the monophyly of the tribe Stomatocalyceae while the tribe Hippomaneae does not consistently form a clade.
KEYWORD	Cyathium; Euphorbieae; Phylogeny;
ARTICLE INFO	Botanical Bulletin of Academia Sinica, Volume 43 Number 1 January 2002, page 57-62, 6 pages
PUBLISHER	Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China