''Solanum seaforthianum'', the Brazilian nightshade, is a flowering evergreen vine of the family Solanaceae native to tropical

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

. As a member of the ''Solanum'' genus, it is related to such plants as the

tomato The tomato is the edible berry of the plant ''Solanum lycopersicum'', commonly known as the tomato plant. The species originated in western South America, Mexico, and Central America. The Mexican Nahuatl word gave rise to the Spanish word ...

and

potato The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Wild potato species can be found from the southern Unit ...

. It is characterized by clusters of four to seven leaves and can climb to a height of given enough room. It blooms in the mid to late summer with clusters of star-shaped purple

inflorescence An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a Plant stem, stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Morphology (biology), Morphologically, it is the modified part of the shoot of sperma ...

followed by scarlet marble-sized berries. The plant is highly heat resistant, but cannot tolerate frost conditions. The plant contains modest amounts of various tropane alkaloids such as atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine and should be considered mildly toxic and inedible. Promising molluscicidal and schistosomicidal activities were displayed for the ''S. seaforthianum'' extracts and fractions which are attributed to the glycoalkaloid content. The species has become widely naturalised outside its native range and is an invasive species in Australia,

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

Indochina Mainland Southeast Asia, also known as the Indochinese Peninsula or Indochina, is the continental portion of Southeast Asia. It lies east of the Indian subcontinent and south of Mainland China and is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the west an ...

, the Pacific Islands and

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, choking native vegetation and poisoning livestock. Solanum seaforthianum invasive

References

seaforthianum Plants described in 1808 Taxa named by Henry Cranke Andrews {{Solanales-stub