PHYLOGENOMICS WORKING GROUP

Coordinators: Rafaela Trad (Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, UK) & Félix Forest (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK)

The year 2024 was a special one for the phylogenomics of legumes with three symposia (and 18 talks!) at the XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid in July 2024 (abstracts can be found at the conference website; see sessions 4, 5 and 10).

Our updates for the phylogenomic section will be short this year, but we look forward to many phylogenomic studies coming up in 2025! The IBC meeting in Madrid showed us that the advances will come for many groups and at all the levels, including works on the family as a whole. Some of the important works we might see soon are the phylogenomic trees of (1) the subfamily Papilionoideae, (2) tribes Mirbelieae and Phaseoleae, the Adesmia clade and others, (3) several genera such as Adesmia DC., Argyrolobium Eckl. & Zeyh., Astragalus L., Ebenus L., Eriosema (DC.) Desv., Inga Mill., Pterocarpus Jacq., and Sindora Miq. It will be interesting to see the results of works using different probe sets. The symposia also gave us some insights into huge advances in the study of distribution patterns and biological processes such as introgression and whole genome duplication, which will allow us to investigate further the reasons that make the legumes such a successful family. An important side meeting also took place in Madrid, focusing mostly on the development of a subfamilial classification for the Papilionoideae. The main outcomes of these discussions can be found here and we encourage you to have a look.

With that we want to wish you all a great 2025 and that the legume community continues to be a reference for a dynamic and lively collaborative network.