PARTE UTILIZADA= Used part: Hojas. 

ACCIÓN FARMACOLÓGICA= Pharmacological action: Contra el mal de la Puna (hojas).

ZONA GEOGRÁFICA= Geografical zone: N de Chile y Argentina. 

DIVERSIDAD GENÉTICA Y MEJORAMIENTO DE PLANTAS MEDICINALES= Medicinal plants and improvement of medicinal herbs

The largest family of flowering plants Asteraceae (Compositae) is found to contain 12 major lineages rather than 5 as previously suggested.  Five of these lineages heretofore had been circumscribed in tribe Mutisieae (Cichorioideae), a taxon shown by earlier mol. studies to be paraphyletic and to include some of the deepest divergences of the family.  Combined analyses of 10 chloroplast DNA loci by different phylogenetic methods yielded highly congruent well-resolved trees with 95% of the branches receiving moderate to strong statistical support.  A strategy of sampling genera identified by morphol. studies as anomalous, supported by broader character sampling than previous studies, resulted in identification of several novel clades.  The generic compns. of subfamilies Carduoideae, Gochnatioideae, Hecastocleidoideae, Mutisioideae, Pertyoideae, Stifftioideae, and Wunderlichioideae are novel in Asteraceae systematics and the taxonomy of the family has been revised to reflect only monophyletic groups.  These results contradict earlier hypotheses that early divergences in the family took place on and spread from the Guayana Highlands (Pantepui Province of northern South America) and raise new hypotheses about how Asteraceae dispersed out of the continent of their origin.  Several nodes of this new phylogeny illustrate the vast differential in success of sister lineages suggesting focal points for future study of species diversification.  The results also provide a backbone exemplar of Asteraceae for supertree construction.  Sequence data are deposited in GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ under accession nos. EU243147-EU243239, EU243242-EU243334, and EU384938-EU385604.

1) TOURSARKISSIAN, Martín. Plantas medicinales de Argentina : sus nombres botánicos, vulgares, usos y distribución geográfica. Buenos Aires : Hemisferio Sur, 1980, 178p.

2) PANERO, Jose L.; FUNK, V. A. The value of sampling anomalous taxa in phylogenetic studies: Major clades of the Asteraceae revealed. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution . 2008, Vol.47, nº2, p.757-782.