National biodiversity data infrastructures: ten essential functions for science, policy, and practice.

Today, at the international level, powerful data portals are available to biodiversity researchers and policymakers, offering increasingly robust computing and network capacities and capable data services for internationally agreed-on standards. These accelerate individual and complex workflows to map data-driven research processes or even to make them possible for the first time. At the national level, however, and alongside these international developments, national infrastructures are needed to take on tasks that cannot be easily funded or addressed internationally.

An expert curated global legume checklist improves the accuracy of occurrence, biodiversity and taxonomic data.

The Legume Phylogeny Working Group's Taxonomy Working Group was tasked to create a community endorsed global legume checklist that will serve as a primary source of taxa for biodiversity data platforms and legume-related research. The checklist was published in June 2021, recognising 772 genera and 22,360 species. It is disseminated through the new Legume Data Portal as part of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) hosted portal initiative.

A review of the ethnobotany, contemporary uses, chemistry and pharmacology of the genus Thesium (Santalaceae).

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: Many plant species representing the hemi-parasitic genus Thesium play important roles in communities around the globe as evidenced by the numerous ethnobotanical and contemporary uses, and pharmacological activities. However, no attempt has been made to amalgamate and analyze all of the available information. A comprehensive survey is needed to highlight knowledge gaps, as well as to determine the economic importance and commercial potential of the genus.

Both Alpha- and Beta-Rhizobia Occupy the Root Nodules of in South Africa.

(formerly ) is a wide-spread legume species indigenous to southern Africa. Little is known regarding the identity or diversity of rhizobia that associate with this plant in its native range in South Africa. The aims of this study were therefore: (i) to gather a collection of rhizobia associated with from a wide range of geographic locations and biomes; (ii) to identify the isolates and infer their evolutionary relationships with known rhizobia; (iii) to confirm their nodulation abilities by using them in inoculation assays to induce nodules under glasshouse conditions.

Crotalarieae and Genisteae of the South African Great Escarpment are nodulated by novel Bradyrhizobium species with unique and diverse symbiotic loci.

The genus Bradyrhizobium contains predominantly nitrogen-fixing legume symbionts. Phylogenetic analysis of the genes responsible for their symbiotic abilities (i.e.

Oberholzeria (Fabaceae subfam. Faboideae), a new monotypic legume genus from Namibia.

Oberholzeria etendekaensis, a succulent biennial or short-lived perennial shrublet is described as a new species, and a new monotypic genus. Discovered in 2012, it is a rare species known only from a single locality in the Kaokoveld Centre of Plant Endemism, north-western Namibia. Phylogenetic analyses of molecular sequence data from the plastid matK gene resolves Oberholzeria as the sister group to the Genisteae clade while data from the nuclear rDNA ITS region showed that it is sister to a clade comprising both the Crotalarieae and Genisteae clades.