Flavonoids of the Sunflower Family (Asteraceae)

Certainly many of the readers of this book will remember the early developments of chemosystematics in the late 1950s.We ourselves remember the excitement of these new data bearing on plant interrelationships.The hopes were high, the techniques were rapidly evolving, the quantities of data were large, and young workers were eagerly enthusiastic.Some even went so far as to predict that chemical data would soon replace morphological information as the basis for plant classification.These overly zealous predictions did not materialize, of course, as the history of plant systematics has amply shown during the past two centuries.If there is any distinct characteristic of systematics it is synthesis, as Lincoln Constance (1964) called it, the "unending synthesis."New tools generate new data and provide insights on additional dimensions of plant relationships.This will never change-we will continue to discover new tools and new data in the years ahead, and they will continue to be incorporated into the predictive general reference system of classification.The earlier efforts in chemosystematics focused on secondary plant products: alkaloids, betacyanins, carbohydrates, cyanogenic glycosides, glucosinolates, lipids, terpenoids, and especialiy flavonoids.The latter were particularly well suited for chemosystematic investigation for several reasons: ease of isolation and characterization, small amounts of plant material needed for analysis, stability of compounds especially through routine preparation of herbarium specimens, and low cost to obtain useful information.As a result of these considerable advantages, literally thousands of studies on use of flavonoids in plant systematics have been published.Although now with the present zest for macromolecular data from DNA restriction sites and sequences, there are fewer workers and laboratories dedicated to flavonoid chemosystematic studies; twenty years ago they were the new currency of exciting data in plant systematics.Because of many workers historically interested in the sunflower family, Asteraceae (or Compositae), in part due to its large size (approximately 23,000 species; Bremer, 1994), and because hundreds of flavonoid compounds were discovered in this family, many chemosystematic investigations have been completed on various taxa.

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