The Andropogoneae, sometimes called the sorghum tribe, are a large tribe of grasses (family

Poaceae Poaceae () or Gramineae () is a large and nearly ubiquitous family of monocotyledonous flowering plants commonly known as grasses. It includes the cereal grasses, bamboos and the grasses of natural grassland and species cultivated in lawns an ...

) with roughly 1,200 species in 90 genera, mainly distributed in tropical and subtropical areas. They include such important crops as

maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American English, North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples of Mexico, indigenous ...

(corn),

sugarcane Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of (often hybrid) tall, perennial grass (in the genus '' Saccharum'', tribe Andropogoneae) that is used for sugar production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalk ...

, and

sorghum ''Sorghum'' () is a genus of about 25 species of flowering plants in the grass family (Poaceae). Some of these species are grown as cereals for human consumption and some in pastures for animals. One species is grown for grain, while many other ...

. All species in this tribe use C₄ carbon fixation, which makes them competitive under warm, high-light conditions. Andropogoneae is classified in supertribe Andropogonodae together with its

sister group In phylogenetics, a sister group or sister taxon, also called an adelphotaxon, comprises the closest relative(s) of another given unit in an evolutionary tree. Definition The expression is most easily illustrated by a cladogram: Taxon A and ...

Arundinelleae Arundinelleae is a tribe of grasses with roughly 90 species in three genera, mainly distributed in tropical and subtropical areas. The tribe's sister group are the Andropogoneae The Andropogoneae, sometimes called the sorghum tribe, are a larg ...

. Subdivisions include 12 subtribes, but the position of several genera within them is still unresolved ('' incertae sedis''). Hybridisation was probably important in the evolution of the Andropogoneae, and the tribe's systematics is still not completely resolved.

Description

Spikelets within the

inflorescence An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Morphologically, it is the modified part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are forme ...

(flower cluster) are generally arranged on spicate racemes in pairs. A fertile, unstalked spikelet is subtended by a sterile, stalked spikelet. In species where awns are present they are found on the fertile, unstalked spikelet as an extension of the

lemma Lemma may refer to: Language and linguistics * Lemma (morphology), the canonical, dictionary or citation form of a word * Lemma (psycholinguistics), a mental abstraction of a word about to be uttered Science and mathematics * Lemma (botany), ...

Subtribes and genera

Classification following Soreng et al. (2017).

References

Panicoideae Poaceae tribes {{Panicoideae-stub