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

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.

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