Format: ORAL

Tiina Srkinen1, Rebecca Hilgenhof1, Edeline Gagnon2, Sandy Knapp3, Leandro Giacomin4

1 Tropical section, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland, UK 2 Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada 3 Life Sciences Division, Natural History Museum, London, UK 4 Department of Systematics and Ecology, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Paraíba, Brazil

Agriculture has benefited fromthe large morphological diversity found within the large genus Solanumthrough the exploitation of tubers (potatoes) and fruits (tomatoes, eggplants, and several minor crops). We present an overview of how taxonomic work on Solanum has developed over the past decades, highlighting what tools and approaches have been useful at different stages and how integrative taxonomy has helped our work. Our main aim is to provide a classification framework for the megadiverse and agriculturally important genus to be used across research fields, including taxonomically authoritative molecular phylogenies, updated list of accepted species names and synonyms, and morphological descriptions of all species. In our view, phylogenies are important but the main core of our work is around morphology, nomenclature and field work as molecular sequence data (including full reference genomes) are being published more widely by non-taxonomists. We are passionate to expand the number of taxonomic specialists working in the genus across different parts of the world, and to provide interactive and visual identification tools that enable botanists to identify Solanum species with higher confidence. Our taxonomic expertise enables us to collaborate with evolutionary developmental biologists and genomics experts to understand the genetic control of distinct morphologies in the group and our understanding of evolution across Solanum. Core part of this work is using our database of taxonomically verified herbarium specimens from across 400 herbaria to characterise species and traits in ecological and geographical space to better understand their biology and function.