Rafflesiaceae

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iRafflesiaceae

Rafflesia kerrii flower

Scientific classification

Kingdom:	Plantae
Division:	Magnoliophyta
Class:	Magnoliopsida
Order:	Malpighiales
Family:	Rafflesiaceae Dum.

Genera

See text.

Rafflesiaceae is a family of parasitic plants found in east and southeast Asia, including Rafflesia arnoldii, the plant with the largest flower of all plants.

Rafflesiaceae was considered an unplaced family in the APG II system, while other authors placed it into the order Rafflesiales together with some other families of parasitic plants. More recent research places the family (in a restricted circumscription) in order Malpighiales (Barkman et al., 2004), and also does not consider the other families of the Rafflesiales order as related anymore (Nickrent et al., 2004).

The family sensu lato has traditionally included 9 genera, which have around 50 species altogether.

Genera

Apodanthes
Bdallophyton
Berlinianche
Cytinus
Mitrastemon
Pilostyles
Rafflesia
Rhizanthes
Sapria

The taxonomic treatment has been varied though, with various authors placing different genera in their own families (Meijer, 1997). More recent taxonomic works treat Rafflesiaceae as a family in the wide sense (Rafflesiaceae sensu lato) with four tribes first recognised by Harms (1935), and supported by Takhtajan et al. (1985).

Tribes

Rafflesieae: Rafflesia, Rhizanthes, Sapria
Apodantheae: Apodanthes, Pilosytles
Cytineae: Bdallophyton, Cytinus
Mitrastemeae: Mitrastema

Illustration of a Rafflesiaceae species from Der Bau und die Eigenschaften der Pflanzen (1913).

Recent research shows that Rafflesiaceae as traditionally circumscribed is polyphyletic. Rafflesiaceae is restricted to the genera Rafflesia, Rhizanthes, and Sapria. The other genera have been moved to families Apodanthaceae (Apodanthes, Berlinianche, Pilostyles), Cytinaceae (Bdallophyton, Cytinus), and Mitrastemonaceae (Mitrastema) (Nickrent et al., 2004), which follows the concept of Harms and Takhtajan et al.

[edit] References

Barkman, T.J., S.-H. Lim, K. Mat Salleh and J. Nais. 2004. Mitochondrial DNA sequences reveal the photosynthetic relatives of Rafflesia, the world's largest flower. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA 101:787–792.
Meijer, W. 1997. Rafflesiaceae, in Flora Malesiana I, 13: 1–42.
Nickrent, D.L., A. Blarer, Y.-L. Qiu, R. Vidal-Russell and F.E. Anderson. 2004. Phylogenetic inference in Rafflesiales: the influence of rate heterogeneity and horizontal gene transfer. BMC Evolutionary Biology 4:40 (HTML abstract PDF fulltext).