Format: ORAL

Knapp, Sandra

Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, United Kingdom

There are only a handful of genera of angiosperms with more than 1,000 species, and they are often left aside by botanists studying plant diversity. Their sheer size frightens us away from beginning to tackle them; they don’t fit into a three- or five- year funding cycle, and making progress, let alone finding a way to begin, can be daunting. But what if we looked at working together in different ways? Not as lone taxonomists working on a group but as a collective – let’s call it a “meta-lab” where different sets of people come together for different types of analysis, all with the goal of understanding something a single botanist could never do in a lifetime. Solanum is one such giant genus, with more than 1,400 currently recognised species distributed on all continents but Antarctica. Solanum was last treated as a whole on a global basis in the 19th century; we know a lot more today about both species diversity and relationships. I will describe how the Solanum “meta-lab” has approached working on such a monster and show how the community approach facilitates significant progress in taxonomy, phylogeny and the production of identification tools; I will also discuss some of our recent advances and where we are going next.