Phylogenetic Classification of Ericaceae: Molecular and Morphological Evidence

A single Mid-Pleistocene long-distance dispersal by a bird can explain the extreme bipolar disjunction in crowberries ( Empetrum )

“…Fifty-two plastid matK nucleotide sequences representing species of all eight subfamilies and 21 of the 24 tribes in Ericaceae (46) were downloaded from GenBank (Table S2). In addition, four new matK sequences representing the plastid diversity of Empetrum were included.…”

“…The tree was rooted with Enkianthus campanulatus (46) by constraining all other taxa to form a monophyletic group. The priors for tMRCA were set to lognormal distributions with logmean = 0, lognormal SD = 1.0, and offset set to 54.5 Myr, 26.5 Myr, and 13.5 Myr for Rhododendron, Vaccinium, and Leucothoe, respectively.…”

Evidence of a myco-heterotroph in the plant family Ericaceae that lacks mycorrhizal specificity

“…Within the plant family Ericaceae, the mainly mycoheterotrophic subfamily Monotropoideae currently contains three tribes: Pterosporeae, Monotropeae and Pyroleae (Kron & Johnson 1997;Kron et al 2002). Most species within this subfamily produce large quantities of dust seeds that lack an endosperm and are therefore fully dependent in the earlier stages of development on myco-heterotrophic nutrition (Leake 1994).…”

Diverse Fossil Epacrids (Styphelioideae; Ericaceae) from Early Pleistocene Sediments at Stony Creek Basin, Victoria, Australia

“…Almost all species are in the distinctive subfamily Styphelioideae (commonly known as epacrids and formerly recognized as the family Epacridaceae). This monophyletic group (Crayn et al 1998;Kron et al 2002) is mainly Australian, although species also occur in the Pacific (most notably New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Hawaii) and Malesia, and one species occurs in temperate South America. Like many other Ericaceae, the Styphelioideae are generally associated with nutrientpoor, often acidic soils.…”