Name: Sapindaceae
Meaning of Name:
Sapindaceae, From Latin sapo indicus (‘soap of India’) + Latin -āceae (the feminine plural of -āceus, ‘resembling’, a suffix used to form the taxonomic family names of plants, algae, bacteria, and fungi)
Common Names:
The soapberry family
Botanical Information:
Sapindaceae, or the soapberry family, contains close to 140 genera and 1,860 species.
Many economically important species are in this family, with products including fruits, woods, cleaning agents, and ornamentals.
The Sapindaceae family is defined by molecular phylogenetic analysis. Two former families — the Aceraceae (maple family) and Hippocastanaceae (buckeye and horse chestnut family) — were brought into this family following research published in 2005 by Harrington et al..
The image chosen to illustrate this family shows the location of the matK gene in the chloroplast genome of Arabidopsis thaliana (not a member of Sapindaceae).
matK and rbcL DNA sequences unique to Sapindaceae were used to classify this family.
Picture : Emmanuel Douzery, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
