Abstracts, XIV OPTIMA Meeting, Palermo (Italy) , 9-15

XIV OPTIMA Meeting, Palermo (Italy), 9-15 September 2013
Phylogenetic relationships of Careae and related tribes of Apiaceae
PAPINI A.
Dept. of Biology, Università di Firenze, Firenze, Italy. E-mail alpapini@unifi.it
Tribe Careae Baill. (family Apiaceae, subfamily Apioideae Seem.) is composed by some quite well
known genera such as Carum L. to which belongs the cultivated Carum carvi (Papini & al. 2007.
Genet. Molec. Biol. 30(2): 475-482), together with other less known genera, some of which particularly
interesting for their growth form and their ecological niche, such as Chamaesciadium C. A. Meyer
(Papini 2006. Fl. Medit. 16: 5-15).
The closest sister group to tribe Careae is Pyramidoptereae Boiss., whose most important genus (for
species number) is Bunium L. (Degtjareva & al. 2009. Bot. J. Linn. Soc. 160: 149-170).
Our results and those by other authors, such as Degtjareva & al. (2009) show that Carum is polyphyletic,
with some members of Careae (part of genera) appearing to be more strictly related to
Pyramidopterae. Of particular interest is the relationship between Carum and Bunium. The results by
Degtjareva & al. (2009) show that Bunium is constituted by at least four clades separated one from
each other. One of these clades (that containing Bunium bulbocastanum) appears to be the sister group
of the monotypic Hellenocarum, an amphy-adriatic mediterranean genus (formerly known as Carum
multiflorum). Bunium pinnatiflium appears to be related to asiatic genera and to Carum heldreichii, a
rare species endemic of south mediterranean mountains. Carum apuanum appears to be distantly related
to the rest of Carum, while it appears to be nested within genus Scaligeria (insufficiently sampled
until now) and, together with this genus, it is the sister group of most of the Pyramidoptereae. Tribe
Careae appears to contain much less species than those that were included in before, with Carum carvi
L. (the typic species of genus Carum) forming a clade with Fuernrohria, Falcaria, Aegopodium,
Chamaesciadium, Rhabdosciadium, Aegokeras and Grammosciadium (Papini 2006).
Conclusion - The here presented phylogenetic analysis shows that the molecular data (nuclear rDNA
ITS sequences) conflict largely with the traditional classification based on morphological data, largely
obtained from the fruit. We conclude that morphological characters related to the fruit appear to
show often parallelism and hence homoplasy (Degtjareva & al. 2013. Pl. Syst. Evol. 299(5): 985-
1010). As a consequence new morphological characters patterns are needed to better indentify and distinguish
many members of Careae from other genera belonging to Pyramidoptereae.
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