128 Plant Protection Quarterly Vol.21(3) 2006 dioecious species examined had on aver- age twice the genome size of the South Af- Review of the current taxonomic status and rican hermaphroditic species and, based on internal transcribed spacers of nuclear authorship for Asparagus weeds in Australia ribosomal DNA, the species can be divided into two clusters, one of European species Kathryn L. Batchelor and John K. Scott, CSIRO Entomology, Private Bag 5, and the other of southern Africa species. PO Wembley, Western Australia 6913, Australia. Both Lee et al. (1997) and Stajner et al. Email:
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[email protected] (2002) did not use outgroup taxa in their analyses. This issue and a larger sam- ple size (24 species) were addressed in a study by Fukuda et al. (2005) of the mo- Summary Systematic taxonomy of genera lecular phylogeny of Asparagus inferred Over the last 20 years, many scientifi c within the Asparagaceae from plastid petB intron and petD-rpoA papers and reports have been produced The debate over whether the Asparagace- intergenic spacer sequences. They found outlining the establishment, distribution ae contains one genus Asparagus with or evidence supporting a monophyletic ori- and weed status of Asparagus weeds in without subgenera, or up to 16 separate gin of Asparagus and the sub-division of Australia. Differing use of authorship genera has been going for over 200 years. Asparagus into more than three groups. and species names are present in this lit- The taxonomic history of the Asparagace- The Eurasian species of Asparagus formed erature resulting in confusion over which ae is well covered in recent papers.