The genus Fagonia L. (family Zygophyllaceae,) included under the order Zygophyllales in the Fabids (APG IV, 2016), consists of approximately 35 species, possess disjunct distribution covering arid area of new and old word (Beier, 2005).
More...The genus Fagonia L. (family Zygophyllaceae,) included under the order Zygophyllales in the Fabids (APG IV, 2016), consists of approximately 35 species, possess disjunct distribution covering arid area of new and old word (Beier, 2005). The species of Fagonia are herbs, shrub, shurblets of about 60 to 100 cm maximum in length and width respectively. Fagonia indica Burm.f. is a thorny wild medicinal herb (Qureshi et al., 2015), possess saponins and oleanolic acid (Shaker et al., 1999; Yeung and Che, 2009), exhibited antitumor activity (Naglaa et al., 2011), growing widely in Asian and African deserts (Beier, 2005) including the Empty Quarter of south-central Arabia (Mandavil, 1986) where the annual precipitation is even less than 35 mm or no rain for several years. The systematic relationships of the families Zygophyllaceae and Krameriaceae of the order Zygophyllales have often been controversial (APG IV, 2016). Tao et al. (2018) discussed the pollen evolution in the order Zygophyllales. Zygophyllaceae have often been found to be sister to Krameriaceae (Soltis et al., 1998; Savolainen et al., 2000; Wang et al., 2009); however, the wood anatomy supports the separation of Krameriaceae from the Zygophyllaceae (Carlquist, 2005). Granot and Grafi (2014) argued that the epigenetic information revealed for Zygophyllaceae can be useful to phylogenetic approaches, but the placement of Krameriaceae under the Zygophyllales need to be re-examined. Hence, we herein for the first time sequenced the complete plastome of F. indica, and assessed the systematic relationships of the families Zygophyllales.
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