Leguminosae
Background
The Leguminosae has been a focus of research at Kew since the work of Bentham in the mid 19th century. More recently, participation in a growing number of multi-disciplinary projects, both within and outside Kew, as well as in four International Legume Conferences, has shaped the present thrust of legume research at Kew and to a large extent internationally. The conferences alone have generated thirteen volumes (eleven published by Kew) in the Advances in Legume Systematics, Advances in Legume Science, and Advances in Legume Biology series and Kew staff, across several departments, have made major contributions to these. Research is multi-disciplinary and includes studies in phytochemistry, wood anatomy, palynology, plant-animal interactions, reproductive biology, ontogeny, molecular systematics, seed germination and storage, and taxonomy. The team is a major contributor in an international network, with a broad focus on higher level systematics, effective use of modern techniques and increasing use of electronic media for identification, inventory and GIS.
Over recent years Kew’s regional focus for legumes has been in Eastern and Southern Africa, Cameroon, Gabon, Madagascar, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador – the breadth of this focus is not matched at any other institute. Fieldwork has been geared to collecting critical taxa by region, providing a wide range of plant materials to facilitate collaboration, cross-referenced to authentically named herbarium vouchers.
Since 2001, between 3,000 to 4,000 new herbarium specimens have been accessioned each year, and on average the legume collection receives two international visitors per week, peaking to five or more during university vacations or conferences. It is a policy of the legume section to ensure that users have access to the most recently accessioned material and to collections carefully curated according to the most up-to-date revisions and monographs. Floristic work has provided the nucleus for more detailed monographic work and has been an essential first step towards an inventory of the legumes in under-explored areas.
The legume collection in the herbarium is one of the most comprehensive in the world (with about 725,000 specimens, including c. 30,000 types) and uniquely contains global representation of nearly all 728 genera currently recognised, thus making it ideally suited for targeted monographic and floristic work and multi-disciplinary science. The herbarium collections are cross-referenced to extensive ancillary collections such as fruits (5,700 samples), material preserved in spirit (c. 2,000), wood (3,800), illustrations (6,000 many originals), and over 14,000 high quality 35mm colour slides. Major genetic resources are the seed collections, live plants (c. 1,237 plant accessions covering over 800 taxa), and the DNA Bank (688 legume accessions). The Herbarium houses c. 5,000 comparative seed collections (including those in the Krukoff collection), and a further 1,817 samples representing 145 genera are held in the Economic Botany Collections (EBC), together with 700 fruit samples. In addition to the wood samples mentioned above, the EBC holds a total of 8,826 specimens and artefacts of legume origin (3,921 of which are wood samples) in their economic botany collections. There are c. 190 legume chromosome collections covering c. 110 species, 1,580 mass spectrometric analyses (LC-MS and GC-MS) of extracts of legumes archived electronically, and over 2,015 pollen slides covering 1,947 species (for the whole Fabales clade 2,126 slides representing 2,030 species). Legume researchers at Kew have access to the plant micromorphology bibliographic database, the economic botany bibliographic database, extensive bibliographic and pictorial resources in the library and a comprehensive reprint collection. Kew compiles, edits and globally distributes the annual legume systematics newsletter Bean Bag.