Paris (genus)

Paris is the botanical name of a genus of flowering plants. It consists of less than two dozen herbaceous plants: the best known species is Paris quadrifolia. The primary center of Paris diversity is China; the genus includes representatives native to Europe and Asia. Some Paris species are used in traditional Chinese medicine for their analgesic and anticoagulant properties, most notably as an ingredient of Yunnan Baiyao. Intense ethnopharmaceutical interest has significantly reduced their numbers.^[1]

These plants are closely related to Trillium, with the distinction traditionally being that Trillium contains species which have trimerous (three-petaled) flowers, and Paris contains species which have 4- to 11-merous flowers.^[2] A recent analysis places the genera Daiswa and Kinugasa in Paris, though the actual circumscription of the genus is debated.^[3]

References

1. ^ Chun-Lin Long, Heng Li, Zhiqin Ouyang, Xiangyun Yang, Qin Li, and Bruce Trangmar (2002). "Strategies for agrobiodiversity conservation and promotion: a case from Yunnan, China". Biodiversity and Conservation 11: 1146–1154. 
2. ^ Susan B. Farmer and Edward E. Schilling (2002). "Phylogenetic analyses of Trilliaceae based on morphological and molecular data". Systematic Botany 27 (4): 674–692. http://www.goldsword.com/sfarmer/Article/index.html. 
3. ^ Yunheng Ji, Peter W. Fritsch, Heng Li, Tiaojiang Xiao, and Zhekun Zhou (2006). "Phylogeny and classification of Paris (Melanthiaceae) inferred from DNA sequence data". Annals of Botany 98 (1): 245–256. doi:10.1093/aob/mcl095. PMC 2803534. PMID 16704998. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2803534.