BACKGROUND The Pteridaceae family is the largest fern family in Togo by its specific and generic diversity. Like all other families of ferns in the country, Pteridaceae are poorly studied and has no identification key. The objective of this study is to perform a taxonomic revision and list establishment of this family of leptosporangiate ferns in the light of current available knowledge about t...

—Fern identification usually requires the use of mature sporophytes, since attempts to identify juveniles using morphological traits often provides unsatisfactory results. Here we examined young sporophytes found among boulders in a river basin of a xeric valley in central Peru. Attempts to identify these sporophytes first pointed to four different genera, two in Pteridaceae (Anogramma and Pity...

The monophyletic Pteridaceae accounts for roughly 10% of extant fern diversity and occupies an unusually broad range of ecological niches, including terrestrial, epiphytic, xeric-adapted rupestral, and even aquatic species. In this study, we present the results of the first broad-scale and multi-gene phylogenetic analyses of these ferns, and determine the affinities of several previously unsamp...

A number of fern species, belonging to several genera of Pteridaceae, exhibit a more or less conspicuous farinose wax, which is mostly located on the lower leaf surface. Production of these waxes is often correlated with the presence of glandular trichomes. Particularly during the past two decades, a series of publications appeared on the chemical composition of these exudates. The major compon...

1. Subject and Source The group of fern from the genus Pteris (Pteridaceae) contains 250 cosmopolitan species (Mabberley, 1997). One species, P. cretica (Japanese name: ohbano-inomotoso) called Cretan brake fern is widely distributed in the temperate and warm area of Japan. Although some fern members of the family Pteridaceae are well known to contain carcinogenic C-14 illudane-type sesquiterpe...

Six new ent-15-oxokauran-19-oic acid derivatives, named pterisolic acids A-F (1-6), were isolated from the ethanol extract of the fern Pteris semipinnata (Pteridaceae), and the structures of these new ent-kauranoids were elucidated on the basis of extensive spectroscopic studies and single crystal X-ray diffraction analysis.