XVI International Botanical Congess

The genera of the Campanulaceae have traditionally been difficult to circumscribe, perhaps because of a lack of appreciation of the range of variation within the family as a whole. Capsule morphology has been used most frequently to classify the family into three tribes: the Platycodoneae, the Wahlenbergeae, and the Campanuleae, but phylogenetic relationships remain very unclear. This study compared cladistic analyses of 29 genera using floral characters and nucleotide base sequences of the ITS region of ribosomal DNA. Although the use of ITS sequence data at the generic level presents problems such as those of multiple alignment, the results show a moderate degree of congruence with morphological data sets. This suggests that an intuitive eclectic approach using all available data may be the best way to attain a plausible phylogenetic hypothesis.