Comparative fruit morphology and its systematic significance in Ferula (Apiaceae) species from different growth habitats
Аннотация
A comprehensive study was conducted on the fruits of 49 Ferula species, mostly from Central Asia, to describe the fruit surface microstructure and understand the systematic significance of this character for infrageneric delimitation. Ancestral states of the key morphometric characters were reconstructed via Mesquite, and distribution of informative characters at generic level was inferred using a Bayesian phylogenetic tree. In addition, chemical compound fingerprints for 21 Ferula species detected via HPLC-DAD were analysed with the COW algorithm in MATLAB 2019a, and optimised in a cladistic analysis, which showed incongruence with molecular data. This research aimed to define species groups within the economically important and taxonomically complex genus Ferula, and detected incongruence between the carpological, molecular and chemical data.