Two years after his landmark work, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, Charles Darwin in a letter to Joseph Hooker, the assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, wrote “I never was more interested in any subject in my life, than this of orchids”. In 1862, Darwin published a book “On the Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects” in wh...
Doctor ZHANG Ticao and Professor SUN Hang published their new findings on biogeographic implications of Dry-Hot (Warm) Valleys of Southwest (SW) China. Their findings suggest that tectonic events not only made the continuous range of organisms into disjunctive pieces, but also made the disjunctions into continuous.
It is commonly known that the topography of Hengduan Mountains, SW China, ha...
Soroseris, Stebbinsia, and Syncalathium are three genera of the sunflower family (Asteraceae) with restricted distributions on high screes of the Tibetan Plateau. A molecular analysis to test the monophyly of the genera, evaluate the phylogenetic relationships and construct their biogeographic diversification history.
Nuclear ITS and plastid trnL-F and psbA-trnH fragments were analyzed with...
Being low in calories and high in proteins, fibre, vitamins and minerals, a large number of wild mushrooms are valuable for food, and, thus, the consumption of wild edible mushrooms, a popular delicacy in many countries, has been increasing very rapidly.
Mushroom poisoning cases have been frequently reported in East Asia or even in other parts of the world. Some of the toxins in the mushroo...
Mycorrhizae play a vital role in the life cycle and evolutionary history of orchids. The genera Cypripedium and Paphiopedilum, both belonging to the subfamily Cypripedioideae of the Orchidaceae, are very well known as slipper orchids in horticultural science. However, due to the environment disruption and over collection of the orchids, all species in the two genera are listed in the Appendix o...
Predicting global change is a scientific question as well as a general concern of human society. To accurately predict global change, we must master the climate changes in geologic history time and history period. The reconstruction of paleclimate can not only provide important basic information for predicting global change, but also provide an opportunity to discuss the interrelationship betwe...
Lepiotaceous fungi are in general saprotrophic forest floor dwellers. Some of them are excellent edible fungi while quite a few are poisonous. As this group of fungi act a key role in the evolution of basidiomycetes, they have long been the research interests for many mycologists.
Under the financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants no. 30800004) and the Joi...
On the basis of abundant field investigation, researchers YANG Zhu-Liang, LIU Pei-Gui, LIU Ji-Kai and their team collected 5300 specimens, more than 1290 strains, more than 700 mycorrhizal samples, more than 300 population genetics materials and chemical constituents samples of 30 species. On this basis, they carried out classification and systematics research for some important groups in alpin...
Professor QIU Ming-Hua and his group has isolated and identified 164 compounds, including 40 new constituents, 2 of which have novel skeleton, from six samples which are the rhizome of Cimicifuga foetida L and Cimicifuga yunnanensis H collected from Dali, Lijiang in Yunnan and Weining in Guizhou. Cooperating with Kunming Medical College, the group tested those compounds’ cytotoxicities against...
