Gymnarrhenoideae is a subfamily with in the family

Asteraceae The family Asteraceae, alternatively Compositae, consists of over 32,000 known species of flowering plants in over 1,900 genera within the order Asterales. Commonly referred to as the aster, daisy, composite, or sunflower family, Compositae w ...

, with only one tribe, the Gymnarrheneae. Two very different species have been assigned to it, '' Gymnarrhena micrantha'', a winter annual from the deserts of North-Africa and the Middle-East, and '' Cavea tanguensis'', a perennial herb that grows on scree near streams and glaciers in the Eastern Himalayas. These species have very little in common, other than having two types of flower heads and sharing a tendency towards dioecism. Both also have basal leaf rosettes, stretched leaves, with few spaced teeth on the margin, and both lack spines and latex.

Taxonomy

The subfamily Gymnarrhenoideae and tribe Gymnarrheneae were erected in 2009 by Jose Panero and Vicki Funk to accommodate the isolated position of ''Gymnarrhena'' that is suggested by genetic analyses. A later analysis including rare species from China illustrated that ''Cavea'' is its sister taxon.

Phylogeny

Based on recent genetic analysis, it is now generally accepted that the

Pertyoideae The Pertyoideae are a subfamily of the family Asteraceae of the flowering plants. It comprises a single tribe, Pertyeae, of six genera Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil org ...

subfamily is sister to a clade that has as its basal member the Gymnarrhenoideae, and further consists of the

Asteroideae Asteroideae is a subfamily of the plant family Asteraceae. It contains about 70% of the species of the family. It consists of several tribes, including Astereae, Calenduleae, Eupatorieae, Gnaphalieae, Heliantheae, Senecioneae and Tageteae. Aste ...

Corymbioideae ''Corymbium'' is a genus of flowering plants in the Asteraceae, daisy family comprising nine species. It is the only genus in the subfamily Corymbioideae and the tribe Corymbieae. The species have leaves with parallel veins, strongly reminiscent ...

and

Cichorioideae The Cichorioideae are a subfamily of the family Asteraceae of flowering plants. Familiar members of Cichorioideae include lettuce, dandelions, chicory and '' Gazania'' species. The subfamily comprises about 240 genera and about 2900 species. It i ...

. These three subfamilies share a deletion of nine

base-pair A base pair (bp) is a fundamental unit of double-stranded nucleic acids consisting of two nucleobases bound to each other by hydrogen bonds. They form the building blocks of the DNA double helix and contribute to the folded structure of both DNA ...

s in the ndhF gene which is not present in ''Gymnarrhena micrantha''. Current insights in the relationships of ''Gymnarrhena'' to the closest Asterid subfamilies is represented by the following tree.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q14118472 Asteraceae Asterales subfamilies