A cyber monograph and phylogeny of the papaya family, Caricaceae: Providing the context for the fully sequenced genome of a worldwide crop

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Sabine Renner
• Subject Area: Evolution and Systematics of Plants and Fungi
• Term: from 2011 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 208475210

• Final Report Year: 2014

Final Report Abstract

This project addressed two challenges of modern systematics: increasing the rate of species discovery, and the speed and ease of species identification (the naming of unidentified material for which a name is available, the obvious precondition for knowing if material presents a yet unnamed species). Only with reliably circumscribed and named species and their sequences deposited in GenBank can the promise of DNA barcodes be met, namely the easy identification of unnamed specimens via diagnostic DNA sequences. For the Caricaceae, this is now possible because all sequences produced in this project are publicly available and will turn up when a researcher BLASTs his/her own unnamed sequences against those in GenBank. Second, increasing the rate of species discovery requires an assessment of the existing names for the respective group (in the case of Caricaceae: 234). For the Caricaceae, this cleanup task has been carried out in the published e-monograph that resulted from this project (http://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/caricaceae). Last not least, the research revealed the true wild relatives of the important fruit crop Carica papaya as well as its likely place of domestication in Southern Mexico/Guatemala, fitting with long-known smallfruited wild populations there.

Publications

• 2012. A dated phylogeny of the papaya family (Caricaceae) reveals the crop’s closest relatives and the family’s biogeographic history. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 65(1): 46-53
  Carvalho, F., and S. S. Renner
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2012.05.019)
• 2013. Correct names for some of the closest relatives of Carica papaya: A review of the Mexican/Guatemalan genera Jarilla and Horovitzia. Phytokeys 29: 63–74
  Carvalho, F. A. and S. S. Renner
  
• 2013. The phylogeny of the Caricaceae. Pp. 81–92 in Genetics and genomics of papaya, eds. R. Ming and P. Moore, Springer Verlag
  Carvalho, F., and S. S. Renner
  
• E-Monograph of the Cariaceae
  Carvalho, F. A.
  
• Taxonomy in the electronic age and an e-monograph of the papaya family (Caricaceae) as an example. Cladistics, 31,3, June 2015, Pages 321-329
  Carvalho, F. A., D. Filer, and S. S. Renner
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/cla.12095)