The grass family (Poaceae or Gramineae) is the fourth largest flowering plant family in the world and contains about 11,000 species in 800 genera worldwide. Twenty-three genera contain 100 or more species or about half of all grass species, and almost half of the 800 genera are monotypic or diatypic, i.e., with only one or two species (Watson and Dallwitz 1992, 1999). Over the last 150 years th...

The subtribe Eleusininae Dumort. (Poaceae: Chlorid­ oideae: Cynodonteae) is a morphologically diverse group, characterized by having racemose inflorescences (with a few exceptions) and contains about 212 species in 31 genera found primarily in low latitudes in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Ten of the genera are currently monotypic (Apochiton C.E.Hubb., Austrochloris Lazarides, Dakn...

Pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) are a class of secondary metabolites found in various unrelated angiosperm lineages including cool-season grasses (Poaceae, subfamily Pooideae). Thesinine conjugates, saturated forms of PA that are regarded as non-toxic, have been described to occur in the two grass species Lolium perenne and Festuca arundinacea (Poaceae, subfamily Pooideae). In a wider screen, we ...

Insertion/deletion events (indels) and nucleotide substitutions at the extreme 39 end of the chloroplast gene matK have been identified that distinguish certain major lineages of grasses. A 1-bp (base pair) deletion creating a shift in the open reading frame (ORF) and a point mutation support the positions of Streptochaeta and Anomochloa as the two most basal lineages in Poaceae. Another 1-bp d...

Foxtail millet is one of the world's oldest cultivated crops. It has been adopted as a model organism for providing a deeper understanding of plant biology. In this study, 45 simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers of Setaria italica were developed. These markers showing polymorphism were screened in 223 samples from 12 foxtail millet populations around Taiwan. The most common dinucleotide and tr...

GrassBase and GrassWorld are the largest structured descriptive datasets in plants, publishing descriptions of 11,290 species in the DELTA format. Twenty nine years of data compilation and maintenance have created a dataset which now underpins much of the Poaceae bioinformatics. GrassBase and GrassWorld can continue to grow productively if the proliferation of alternative classifications and da...