Ray's family system was later extended by Pierre Magnol (1638 1715) and Joseph de Tournefort (1656 1708), a student of Magnol, achieved notoriety for his botanical expeditions, his emphasis on floral characters in classification, and for reviving the idea of the genus as the basic unit of classification.
In Pedicularis, floral characters were emphasized in several classifications [ 24, 26– 28] before Li [ 2, 29]; however, floral characters show a higher degree of homoplasy than that of phyllotaxy [ 2, 6, 21, 29].
Unlike Linnaeus, whose plant classification was based entirely on floral reproductive organs, Ray classified plants by overall morphology: the classification in his 1682 book Methodus Plantarum Nova draws on flowers, seeds, fruits, and roots.
Fragrances still fall into a handful of categories: floral, Oriental, citrus, woodsy and a new classification called "fresh". All contain scores of aromatic ingredients, some derived from real flowers, herbs and spices and others manufactured in laboratories to simulate the smell of, say, an ocean breeze or mountain air.
Since the majority of libraries used in the original EST sequencing were from fruit or floral buds, it is reasonable to expect functional classification of the whole array to be similar to the classification for those genes regulated in fruit development.
The morphological dataset is based on 41 characters, of these, 25 are floral and important traits previously used for subgeneric classification within Petrocosmea (see Additional file 1: Appendix S1).
Traditionally, classification of Lilium has focused primarily on floral morphology, especially orientation of the flowers with respect to the ground and corolla shape.
Based on the phylogeny of Pedicularis, our further aims were to: (i) compare the resulting molecular topology with traditional classifications; and (ii) explore systematic implications of vegetative and floral characters.
The classification of mating system on the basis of floral morphology can lead to false attributions and does not provide any quantitative measure of actual outcrossing rates.
Based on the above comparisons of traditional classifications with molecular phylogenies, we reconfirm that vegetative traits are more reliable than floral traits in the infra-generic classification in Pedicularis [ 2, 21, 23].
Floral Genome Project unigene assemblies and finished cDNAs were regularly subjected to phylogenetically-based classification.
