Abstract

A REVIEW ON MODERN TRENDS IN PLANT TAXONOMY

Suresh Kumar Channaveeraiah and Keshamma Entoori*

ABSTRACT

Taxonomy, which is the science of grouping and organizes any things according to morphological similarities, has been known from the first day of human creature. This grouping or classification should be based on homology i.e., the individuals gathered in the same group must share characteristics that have been inherited from a common ancestor. Within the last fifty years, plant taxonomists have begun to look for more precise techniques in order to understand the relation between the genera and the families. A lot of questions have been brought in mind, which is more advanced and which are less? What is the origin of these plants? Which more related and which must kept apart? And many other questions are kept in mind. These have made the taxonomists to go farther inside the internal structures of the plants and especially the chromosome structure, DNA sequences and genome structure. This what we called molecular taxonomy. Data obtained from this study are compared with those obtained from other tools of taxonomy and all these data have used for cladistic analysis and phylogenetic interpretation. Furthermore. to study the modern trends in taxonomy we must go through the history of classification and how this branch has developed with the development of peoples, instruments and techniques. We must keep in our minds that taxonomy today is a reflection of the past, meanwhile the systems of classification reflect both needs, level of knowledge, philosophical concepts and available technology of each historical period. Therefore, the main purpose of this narrative review of literature study is to describe and delineate on modern trends and updated knowledge being practiced in plant taxonomy.

Keywords: Taxonomy, Modern trends, History, Morphology.