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Methods in
Molecular Biology 2222
Molecular
Plant Taxonomy
Methods and Protocols
Second Edition
METHODS IN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
Series Editor
John M. Walker
School of Life and Medical Sciences
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK
Second Edition
Edited by
Pascale Besse
UMR PVBMT, Universite de la Reunion, St Pierre, Réunion, France
Editor
Pascale Besse
UMR PVBMT
Universite de la Reunion
St Pierre, Réunion, France
This Humana imprint is published by the registered company Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer
Nature.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
Preface
Plant taxonomy is an ancient discipline facing new challenges with the availability of a vast
array of modern molecular technologies. The literature reviews and protocols that appear as
chapters in this book were selected to provide conceptual as well as technical guidelines to
plant taxonomists and geneticists. This second edition of Molecular Plant Taxonomy
appeared necessary to take into account the increasing use of next-generation sequencing
(NGS) technologies for many applications in plant taxonomy.
The introductive Chapter 1 allows the reader to travel through the historical aspects of
plant taxonomy with a focus on the strengths, limitations, and the future of molecular
techniques. Chapter 2 then proposes guidelines to choose the best sequence and molecular
technique to be used according to the taxonomic question addressed. A temporal landscape
of the most commonly used techniques is also provided. Both chapters are prerequisite
readings to understand the concepts underlying the “plant taxonomy” discipline and to fully
appreciate the strengths and limits of each molecular technique presented in this book.
DNA extraction protocols specifically focused on recalcitrant plant species (Chapter 3)
and herbarium specimens (Chapter 4) are proposed. The latter will ensure the development
of an “integrative” taxonomic approach by allowing the use of ancient DNA references from
herbarium specimens together with present-date accessions in DNA analyses.
Next-generation sequencing technologies have opened a new era for molecular plant
taxonomy. This revised edition provides literature review and wet-lab protocols and/or
decision flowcharts covering whole chloroplast (Chapter 5) and mitochondrial (Chapter 6)
genome sequencing, now more and more replacing the Sanger sequencing of specific
regions described in the earlier version of this book. We also chose to present an updated
protocol for microsatellite markers isolation based on Illumina sequencing (Chapter 11) to
complement classical enriched library construction described in the first version. This
NGS-based method is powerful enough to reveal numerous microsatellite loci, which are
markers of choice for molecular plant taxonomy. New methods to discover single nucleotide
polymorphism (SNP) markers from sequenced pangenomes (Chapter 9) are also described,
together with the simple and powerful genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) method to
develop SNP markers without any need for whole genome sequencing and assembly,
perfectly suited for many plant species (Chapter 10).
This book still provides detailed literature reviews and detailed wet-lab protocols for
many multilocus PCR-based profiling methods that have been shown to be very efficient in
resolving many molecular plant taxonomy issues: amplified fragment length polymorphism
(AFLP, Chapter 12), random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD, Chapter 13) and their
multiple derived techniques, inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR, Chapter 14), and the use
of a range of methods tagging retrotransposable elements (Chapter 15). It also provides a
protocol for Sanger sequencing and data analysis of the widely used internal transcribed
spacer (ITS) nuclear region in plants (Chapter 7), and the usefulness and power of this ITS
region together with that of various chloroplast regions as a “DNA barcoding” tool is
reviewed and assessed (Chapter 8): it is now clear that using these simple “barcode tools” as
defined by the CBOL (consortium for the barcoding of life) for resolving plant taxonomy
will not be sufficient, particularly in some plant groups. We rather highly recommend that
molecular approaches are used within an “integrative taxonomy” framework, combining a
v
vi Preface
range of nucleic acid and cytogenetic data together with other crucial information (taxon-
omy, morphology, anatomy, ecology, reproductive biology, biogeography, paleobotany,
etc.), which will help not only to best circumvent species delimitation but also to resolve
the evolutionary processes in play. In this respect, Chapters 17, 18, and 19, covering
cytogenetic techniques such as flow cytometry, chromosome banding, fluorescent in situ
hybridization (FISH), and genomic in situ hybridization (GISH), are essential to provide
tools allowing the assessment of plant genome size, ploı̈dy, aneuploidy, reproductive mode,
species relationships, and interspecific hybrids. Moreover, the generation of large sets of
SNP markers through NGS technologies now allows detailed population genomics studies
(Chapter 16) that can help to resolve the evolutionary processes in play in natural popula-
tions through the analysis of population structure, the inference of population splits and
exchanges, and the detection of footprints of natural or artificial selection. Although the
primary focus of plant taxonomy is on the delimitation of species, molecular approaches now
provide a better understanding of evolutionary processes, at species and population level, a
particularly important issue for some taxonomic complex groups and a prerequisite to
resolve speciation processes. This is essential when one wants to apply plant taxonomy to
conservation issues.
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
vii
viii Contents
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
Contributors
KANTIPUDI NIRMAL BABU • Indian Institute of Spices Research, Kozhikode, Kerala, India
PHILIPP E. BAYER • School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth,
Australia
GUILLAUME BESNARD • CNRS-UPS-IRD, UMR5174, EDB, Université Paul Sabatier,
Toulouse, France
PASCALE BESSE • UMR PVBMT, Universite de la Reunion, St Pierre, Réunion, France
SVETLANA BORONNIKOVA • Department of Botany and Genetics of Plants, Faculty of Biology,
Perm State University, Perm, Russia
CARINE CHARRON • CIRAD, UMR PVBMT, St Pierre, La Réunion, France
MONICA F. DANILEVICZ • School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia,
Perth, Australia
DENIS DA SILVA • Université de La Réunion, UMR PVBMT, St Pierre, La Réunion, France
JÉRÔME DUMINIL • DIADE, University of Montpellier, IRD, Montpellier, France
DAVID EDWARDS • School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth,
Australia
FÉLICIEN FAVRE • Université de La Réunion, UMR PVBMT, St Pierre, La Réunion, France
CASSANDRIA G. TAY FERNANDEZ • School of Biological Sciences, University of Western
Australia, Perth, Australia
MYRIAM GAUDEUL • Institut de Systématique, Evolution, Biodiversité (ISYEB), Muséum
national d’Histoire naturelle, Sorbonne Université, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes,
Université des Antilles, CNRS, Paris, France
CHRISSEN E. C. GEMMILL • School of Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
ANANDUCHANDRA GIRIDHARI • Indian Institute of Spices Research, Kozhikode, Kerala, India
ELLA R. P. GRIERSON • Plant & Food Research, Palmerston North, New Zealand
MICHEL GRISONI • CIRAD, UMR PVBMT, St Pierre, La Réunion, France
BERTHOLD HEINZE • Department of Genetics, Austrian Federal Research Centre for Forests
(BFW), Vienna, Austria
CYRIL JOURDA • CIRAD, UMR PVBMT, St Pierre, La Réunion, France
RUSLAN KALENDAR • Department of Agricultural Sciences, Viikki Plant Science Centre and
Helsinki Sustainability Centre, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; National
Laboratory Astana, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
ILLATHIDATH PAYATATTI VIJESH KUMAR • Indian Institute of Spices Research, Kozhikode,
Kerala, India
ILIA J. LEITCH • Department of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology, Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, UK
THIBAULT LEROY • Montpellier Institute of Evolutionary Sciences (ISEM), Université de
Montpellier, Montpellier, France; Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research,
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
JACOB I. MARSH • School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth,
Australia
DIVAKARAN MINOO • Providence Women’s College, Kozhikode, Kerala, India
ALEXANDER MUTERKO • The Federal Research Center Institute of Cytology and Genetics,
Novosibirsk, Russian Federation
ix
x Contributors
JAUME PELLICER • Department of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology, Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, UK; Department of Biodiversity, Institut Botànic de
Barcelona (IBB, CSIC-Ajuntament de Barcelona), Barcelona, Spain
NATHALIE PIPERIDIS • SRA, Sugar Research Australia, Te Kowai, QLD, Australia
ROBYN F. POWELL • Department of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology, Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, UK
FATIMA PUSTAHIJA • Faculty of Forestry, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and
Herzegovina
MULIYAR KRISHNA RAJESH • Central Plantation Crops Research Institute, Kasaragod,
Kerala, India
RONAN RIVALLAN • CIRAD, UMR AGAP, Montpellier, France; AGAP, University of
Montpellier, CIRAD, INRAe, Montpellier SupAgro, Montpellier, France
ODILE ROBIN • University Paris-Saclay, CNRS, AgroParisTech, Ecologie Systématique
Evolution, Orsay, France
QUENTIN ROUGEMONT • Département de Biologie, Institut de Biologie Intégrative et des
Systèmes (IBIS), Université Laval, Quebec, QC, Canada
GERMINAL ROUHAN • Institut de Systématique, Evolution, Biodiversité (ISYEB), Muséum
national d’Histoire naturelle, Sorbonne Université, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes,
Université des Antilles, CNRS, Paris, France
KUKKAMGAI SAMSUDEEN • Central Plantation Crops Research Institute, Kasaragod, Kerala,
India
€
MERVI SEPPANEN • Department of Agricultural Sciences, Viikki Plant Science Centre and
Helsinki Sustainability Centre, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
THOTTEN ELAMPILAY SHEEJA • Indian Institute of Spices Research, Kozhikode, Kerala, India;
Division of Crop Improvement and Biotechnology, ICAR-Indian Institute of Spices
Research, Kozhikode, Kerala, India
SONJA SILJAK-YAKOVLEV • University Paris-Saclay, CNRS, AgroParisTech, Ecologie
Systématique Evolution, Orsay, France
ERINJERY JOSE SURABY • Indian Institute of Spices Research, Kozhikode, Kerala, India
VEDRANA VIČIĆ-BOČKOR • Faculty of Science, Department of Molecular Biology, University of
Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
HÉLÈNE VIGNES • CIRAD, UMR AGAP, Montpellier, France; AGAP, University of
Montpellier, CIRAD, INRAe, Montpellier SupAgro, Montpellier, France
LENKA ZÁVESKÁ DRÁBKOVÁ • Laboratory of Pollen Biology, Institute of Experimental Botany
of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
List of Abbreviations
xi
xii List of Abbreviations
Abstract
Taxonomy is the science that explores, describes, names, and classifies all organisms. In this introductory
chapter, we highlight the major historical steps in the elaboration of this science, which provides baseline
data for all fields of biology and plays a vital role for society but is also an independent, complex, and sound
hypothesis-driven scientific discipline.
In a first part, we underline that plant taxonomy is one of the earliest scientific disciplines that emerged
thousands of years ago, even before the important contributions of the Greeks and Romans (e.g., Theo-
phrastus, Pliny the Elder, and Dioscorides). In the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, plant taxonomy benefited
from the Great Navigations, the invention of the printing press, the creation of botanic gardens, and the use
of the drying technique to preserve plant specimens. In parallel with the growing body of morpho-
anatomical data, subsequent major steps in the history of plant taxonomy include the emergence of the
concept of natural classification, the adoption of the binomial naming system (with the major role of
Linnaeus) and other universal rules for the naming of plants, the formulation of the principle of subordina-
tion of characters, and the advent of the evolutionary thought. More recently, the cladistic theory (initiated
by Hennig) and the rapid advances in DNA technologies allowed to infer phylogenies and to propose true
natural, genealogy-based classifications.
In a second part, we put the emphasis on the challenges that plant taxonomy faces nowadays. The still
very incomplete taxonomic knowledge of the worldwide flora (the so-called taxonomic impediment) is
seriously hampering conservation efforts that are especially crucial as biodiversity has entered its sixth
extinction crisis. It appears mainly due to insufficient funding, lack of taxonomic expertise, and lack of
communication and coordination. We then review recent initiatives to overcome these limitations and to
anticipate how taxonomy should and could evolve. In particular, the use of molecular data has been
era-splitting for taxonomy and may allow an accelerated pace of species discovery. We examine both
strengths and limitations of such techniques in comparison to morphology-based investigations, we give
broad recommendations on the use of molecular tools for plant taxonomy, and we highlight the need for an
integrative taxonomy based on evidence from multiple sources.
Key words Classification, Floras, DNA, History, Molecular taxonomy, Molecular techniques, Mor-
pho-anatomical investigations, Plant taxonomy, Species, Taxonomic impediment
Pascale Besse (ed.), Molecular Plant Taxonomy: Methods and Protocols, Methods in Molecular Biology, vol. 2222,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0997-2_1, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021
1
2 Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul
1 Introduction
3.1 One Delimiting, describing, naming, and classifying organisms are activ-
of the Earliest ities whose origins are obviously much older than the word ‘taxon-
Scientific Disciplines omy’—which dates back to the nineteenth century; see above. The
use of oral classification systems likely even predated the invention
of the written language ca. 5600 years ago. Then, as for all vernac-
ular classifications, the precision of the words used to name plants
was notably higher for plants that were used by humans. There was
no try to link names and organisms in hierarchical classifications
since the known plants were all named following their use: some
were for food, others for medicines, poisons, or materials. As early
as that time, several hundreds of plant organisms of various kinds
were identified, while relatively few animals were known and
named—basically those that were hunted or feared [11].
4 Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul
3.2 Toward With the Renaissance, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the
a Scientific beginning of the Great Navigations—e.g., C. Columbus discovered
Classification of Plants the New World from 1492; Vasco da Gama sailed all around Africa
to India from 1497; F. Magellan completed the first circumnavi-
gation of Earth in 1522—allowing to start intensive and large-scale
naturalist explorations around the world: most of the major terri-
tories, except Australia and New Zealand, were discovered as soon
as the middle of the sixteenth century, greatly increasing the num-
ber of plants that were brought back in Europe either by sailors
themselves or naturalists on board. At that time, herbalists still
played a major role in naming and describing plants, in association
with illustrators who were producing realistic illustrations. But
naming and classifying so numerous exotic and unknown plants
from the entire world would not have been possible without three
major inventions. Firstly, the invention of the Gutenberg’s printing
press with moveable type system (1450–1455) made written works
on plants largely available in Europe—the first Latin translation of
Theophrastus’ books came out in 1483. Secondly, the first botanic
gardens were created in Italy in the 1540s, showing the increasing
interest of the population for plants and allowing teaching botany.
Thirdly, in the botanic garden of Pisa, the Italian Luca Ghini
(1490–1556) invented a revolutionary method for preserving—
and so studying—plants, consisting in drying and pressing plants
to permanently store them in books as ‘hortus siccus’ (dried gar-
den), today known as ‘herbaria’—or ‘herbarium specimens.’ These
perennial collections of dried plants were—and are still—a keystone
element for plant taxonomy and its development: from that time,
any observation and experimental result could be linked to specific
plant specimens available for further identification, study of
6 Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul
Fig. 1 Painting of a Cyclamen plant, taken from the Juliana’s book, showing the flowering stems rising from
the upper surface of the rounded corm. According to Dioscorides, those plants were used as purgatives,
antitoxins, skin cleansers, labor inducers, and aphrodisiacs
classified in a more natural and rational way than the solely utilitar-
ian thinking. Convinced that all plants have to reproduce, he
provided a new classification system primarily based on seeds and
fruits: in De Plantis libri XVI (1583), he described 1500 plants that
he organized into 32 groups such as the Umbelliferae and Compo-
sitae—currently Apiaceae and Asteraceae, respectively. Cesalpino
also made a contribution to the naming of plant names, sometimes
adding adjectives to nouns designing a plant, e.g., he distinguished
Edera spinosa (spiny ivy) from Edera terrestris (creeping ivy). This
could be seen as a prefiguration of the binomial naming system that
was established in the eighteenth century and is still used in taxon-
omy. But the science of scientific naming was only starting and
plants—like other living beings—were usually characterized by
several words forming polynomial Latin names: for instance,
tomato was designed as Solanum caule inermi herbaceo, foliis pin-
natis incisis, which means ‘Solanum with a smooth herbaceous
stem and incised pinnate leaves’ [14] (Fig. 2).
Cesalpino contributed to the emergence of the concept of
natural classification, i.e., a classification reflecting the ‘order of
Nature.’ This latter expression involved different interpretations
and classifications through the history of taxonomy, but a natural
classification was always intended to reflect the relationships among
plants. Because the Evolutionary thought was not developed yet, it
basically resulted in clustering plants with similar morphological
features. So, it must be noted that the distinction between artificial
and natural classifications—respectively named ‘systems’ and
‘methods’ at the end of the eighteenth century—is a modern
interpretation of the past classifications. Taking advantage of both
technical progresses like microscopy—in the seventeenth century—
and scientific methods inspired by Descartes (1596–1650), several
attempts were made to reach such a natural classification. For
example, Bachmann—also known as Rivin or Rivinus
(1652–1723)—based his classification on the corolla shape in
Introductio ad rem herbariam in 1690. Altogether, the major inter-
est of these classifications is that they triggered investigations on
many morpho-anatomical characters that could be used by later
taxonomists to describe and circumscribe plant species. The British
John Ray (1627–1705) innovated by not relying anymore on a
single characteristic to constitute groups of plants: he suggested
natural groupings ‘from the likeliness and agreement of the princi-
pal parts’ of the plants, based on many characters—mostly relative
to leaves, flowers, and fruits. He documented more than 17,000
worldwide species in Historia Plantarum (1686–1704) and distin-
guished flowering vs. nonflowering plants, and plants with one
cotyledon, which he named ‘monocotyledons,’ vs. plants with
two cotyledons, ‘dicotyledons.’ Ray also played a major role in
the development of plant taxonomy—and more generally of plant
science—by creating the first text-based dichotomous keys that he
used as a means to classify plants [15].
8 Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul
Fig. 2 Herbarium specimen from the Tournefort’s Herbarium (housed at the Paris
national Herbarium, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, MNHN) displaying a
label with the hand-written polynomial name ‘Aconitum caeruleum, glabrum,
floribus consolid(ae) regalis’
3.3 Naming Plant In spite of the numerous new ideas and systems produced from the
Names: Major 16th to the middle of the eighteenth century, names of plants still
Advances by Linnaeus consisted in polynomial Latin names, i.e., a succession of descrip-
tors following the generic name. This led to a rather long, compli-
cated, and inoperative means to designate plants and became
problematic in the context of the Great Explorations, which
allowed the discovery of more and more plants from all over the
world (major explorations with naturalists on board included, e.g.,
the circumnavigation of La Boudeuse under Bougainville from
1766 to 1769, and the travels to the Pacific of J. Cook between
1768 and 1779). To overcome this impediment involving the
naming of plants, the Swedish Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778)
took a critical step forward for the development of taxonomy.
He suggested dissociating the descriptors of the plant from the
name itself, because according to him, the name should only serve
to designate the plant. Therefore, he assigned a ‘trivial name’ to
each plant (more than 6000 plants in Species Plantarum, 1753)
[16] and this name was binomial, only consisting of two words: the
‘genus’ followed by the ‘species,’ e.g., Adiantum capillus-veneris is
a binomen created by Linnaeus that is still known and used as such
to designate the Venus-hair fern. Although there had been some
attempts of binomials as early as Theophrastus (followed by Cesal-
pino and a few others), Linnaeus succeeded in popularizing his
system as new, universal—applied for all plants and, later on, even
for animals in Systema Naturae [17], and long-lasting. Truly, Species
Plantarum [16] has been a starting point for setting rules in plant
taxonomy. Used since Linnaeus until today, the binomial system
along with other principles for the naming of plants were devel-
oped, standardized, synthesized, and formally accepted by taxono-
mists into a code of nomenclature—initially called ‘Laws of
botanical nomenclature’ [18] and nowadays called the Interna-
tional Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN).
The current code is slightly evolving every 6 years, after revisions
are adopted at an international botanical congress.
Linnaeus also proposed his own artificial classification. With the
goal to describe and classify all plants—and other living beings—
that were ‘put on Earth by the Creator,’ he grouped them based on
the number and arrangement of stamens and pistils within flow-
ers—contrary to Tournefort, who only focused on petals. He called
this classification a ‘sexual system,’ referring to the fundamental
role of flowers in sexual reproduction (Fig. 3). This system included
five hierarchical categories: varieties, species, genera, orders—
equivalent to current families, and classes.
10 Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul
Fig. 3 Linnaeus’s sexual system as drawn by G. D. Ehret for the Hortus Cliffortianus (1735–1748); this
illustration shows the 24 classes of plants that were defined by Linnaeus according to the number and
arrangements of stamens
Plant Taxonomy History and Prospects 11
3.4 The Advent The end of the eighteenth century was conducive to revolutionary
of the Theory ideas in France, including new principles to reach the natural classi-
of Evolution and Its fication. Studying how to arrange plants in space for creating the
Decisive Impact new royal garden of the Trianon in the Palace of Versailles, Bernard
on Taxonomy de Jussieu (1699–1777) applied the key principle of subordination
of characters, which will be published in 1789 by his nephew
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836) in Genera Plantarum
[19]. Bernard and A. L. de Jussieu stated that a species, genus, or
any other taxon of the hierarchical classification should group
plants showing character constancy within the given taxon, as
opposed to the character variability observed among taxa. Since
not all characters are useful at the same level of the classification, the
principle of subordination led to a character hierarchy: characters
displaying higher variability should be given less weight than more
conserved ones in plant classifications. As a result, B. and A. L. de
Jussieu subordinated the characters of flowers—judged more vari-
able and therefore less suitable at higher levels—to the more con-
served characters of seeds and embryos. It was the first application
of this principle in taxonomy, and it could be interpreted today as a
way to limit homoplasy, though the concept of homoplasy had not
been elaborated yet [20].
Whereas botanical taxonomy had long been preponderant and
faster in its development than its zoological counterpart, the trend
was reversed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially
with the application of the principle of subordination of characters
to animals by the French biologists Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck
(1744–1829) and Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). New questions
then arose in the mind of taxonomists, who were not only inter-
ested in naming, describing, and classifying organisms anymore,
but also in elucidating how the observed diversity had been gener-
ated. Early explanatory theories included the theory of the trans-
mutation of species, proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in 1809
in his Philosophie zoologique [21]. This was the first theory to
suggest the evolution of species, although it involved several mis-
leading assumptions such as the notion of spontaneous genera-
tions. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his famous theory
of evolution in On the Origin of Species (1859) [22], and intro-
duced the central concept of descent with modification that later
received extensive support and is still accepted today. This implied
that useful characters in taxonomy, the so-called homologous char-
acters, are those inherited from a common ancestor. Darwin indeed
predicted that ‘our classifications will come to be, as far as they can
be so made, genealogies’ (Darwin 1859, p. 486) [22]. In other
words, since the history of life is unique, only one natural classifica-
tion is possible that reflects the phylogeny. This latter word was
however not coined by Darwin himself, but in 1866 in his Generelle
Morphologie der Organismen [23] by Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919),
who is commonly known for the first illustration of a phylogeny,
12 Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul
3.5 New Methods In the 1960s, facing the subjectivity of the existing methods to
and New Sources reconstruct phylogenies, the new concept of numerical taxonomy
of Characters proposed an entirely new way of examining relationships among
for a Modern taxa. Robert Sokal (1926–2012) and Peter Sneath (1923–2011)
Taxonomy started developing this concept in 1963 [26], and elaborated it as
an objective method of classification. The method consisted in a
quantitative analysis of overall similarities between taxa, based on a
characters-by-taxa data matrix—with characters divided into char-
acter states—and resulting in pairwise distances among taxa. But
this method was not based on any evolutionary theory and the
resulting diagrams could therefore not be reasonably interpreted
in an evolutionary context, or as an evolutionary classification.
Nevertheless, this theory flourished for a while, greatly benefiting
from rapid advances in informatics.
A crucial change in the way botanists practice taxonomy
occurred with the development of the cladistic theory and recon-
struction of phylogenies—using diagrams called cladograms—to
infer the evolutionary history of taxa. Willi Hennig (1913–1976)
initiated this revolution with his book Grundzüge einer Theorie der
Phylogenetischen Systematik, published in 1950 [27], but his ideas
were much more widely diffused in 1966 with the English transla-
tion entitled Phylogenetic Systematics [28]. The primary principle of
cladism, or cladistics, is not to use the overall similarity among taxa
to reconstruct the phylogeny, since similarity does not necessarily
reflect an actual close evolutionary relationship. Instead, Hennig
only based the phylogenetic classification on derived characters,
i.e., the characters that are only inherited from the last common
ancestor to two taxa—as opposed to the primitive characters. Every
taxonomic decision, from a species definition to a system of higher
classification, was to be treated as a provisional hypothesis, poten-
tially falsifiable by new data [29]. This new method benefited from
an increasing diversity of sources of characters to be considered,
thanks to the important technological advances accomplished in
the 1940s and 1950s in cytology, ecology, and especially in
genetics.
The discovery of the double helical structure of the DNA
molecule in 1953, by James Watson and Francis Crick, followed
by the possibility to target specific fragments of the genome for
selectively amplifying DNA—the Polymerase Chain Reaction
Plant Taxonomy History and Prospects 13
Fig. 4 Illustration from ‘Monophyletischer Stammbaum der Organismen’ (Haeckel 1866): plants form one of
the three main branches of the monophyletic genealogical tree of organisms
14 Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul
4.1 How Many Plant Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum, published in 1753, was one of the
Species Are There? first key attempts to document the diversity of plants on a global
scale [16]. In this work, Linnaeus recognized more than 6000
species but erroneously concluded that ‘the number of plants in
the whole world is much less than commonly believed, I ascertained
by fairly safe calculation [. . .] it hardly reaches 10,000’ [16]. Later
on, in 1824, the Swiss A.P. de Candolle, in his Prodromus Systematis
Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis [49], aimed to produce a flora of the
world: he included 58,000 species in seven volumes. Today, we
know that the magnitude of plant diversity is much larger, although
we are uncertain of the exact number of plant species.
There are two questions in estimating the total number of plant
species: the first one is how many species have already been described;
the second one is how many more species are presently unknown to
science.
Our uncertainty about the number of described species is
mostly due to the fact that taxonomists sometimes gave different
names to the same species inadvertently, especially in the past due to
poor communication means between distant scientists. This led to
the existence of multiple names for a single biological entity, a
phenomenon called synonymy. As a consequence, we know that
more than 1,064,908 vascular plant names were published, as
evidenced by the International Plant Names Index (IPNI)
[50, 51], but they would actually represent only 223,000 to
422,000 accepted species—depending on the method of calcula-
tion ([46, 52] and references therein, [53, 54]), with the most
recent estimates of 383,671 [51] and 351,176 according to
The Leipzig Catalogue of Vascular Plants (LCVP) v.1.0.2 by
Freiberg et al. (unpublished). In addition, the disagreement on a
single species concept (see Note 1) among plant taxonomists means
that species counts can easily differ by an order of magnitude or
more when the same data are examined by different botanists
[55]. This leads to a taxonomic inflation, i.e., an increased number
of species in a given group that is not due to an actual discovery of
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CHAPTER LII
LIFE IN SOUTH AMERICA
Cable Facilities
Metric System
The National City Bank, 55 Wall St., New York City, which led the
way, has branches in six of the South American Republics,
The Mercantile Bank of the Americas, 44 Pine St., New York,
The American Foreign Banking Corporation, 53 Broadway, New
York,
W. R. Grace and Company’s Bank, 7 Hanover Square, New York,
The First National Bank, 70 Federal St., Boston,
The American Express Company, 65 Broadway, New York, with
offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; and
Valparaiso, Chile; and with correspondents in other cities, performs
some banking service.
British Banks
Important banks with New York offices and with many branches in
South America are:
The Anglo South American Bank, 49 Broadway, New York,
affiliated with
The British Bank of South America, and with
The Commercial Bank of Spanish America, 49 Broadway, New
York;
The London and River Plate Bank, 51 Wall St., New York,
The London and Brazilian Bank, 56 Wall St., New York,
The Royal Bank of Canada, 68 William St., New York.
Freight Only
Colombia
To Brazil Only