A Worldwide Monograph of Swertia and Its Allies has been published by Science Press recently. The famous Gentianaceae taxonomists, Ho Ting-nong and Liu Shang-wu of Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, CAS, edited this monograph.
A Worldwide Monograph of Swertia and Its Allies is the research achievement that Ho Ting-nong and Liu Shang-wu have done research in the western area under harsh conditions in China for 50 years. Swertia and Its Allies mainly distribute in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Southwest Mountain. Since the early '60s, they started to investigate and collect the Swertia and Its Allies’s field materials for carrying out taxonomic studies of the Chinese species by riding horse. During several decades of field investigation and Laboratory research, they found more than 20 new species from west plateau in China and finished the taxonomic treatment of Swertia and Its Allies in Flora of China. And later, it has cost them almost 30 years to study the thousands specimen collected in Herbariums in the world and organize thousands literatures, finally the thousands species which was reported under the Swertia were assessed as 198 spices and they classified those species into 5 species including Swertia, Sinoswertia, Lomatogoniopsis, Veratrilla and Lomatogonium. The Sinoswertia and Lomatogoniopsis are the new species which were found by Ho Ting-nong and Liu Shang-wu.
This taxonomic treatment study of Swertia, which has thousands published spices, is rarely seen in the world. It is the typical example of the large genus taxonomic treatment study in the scope of world on the foundation of Flora of China; it will definitely encourage Chinese botanists to finish the large genus taxonomic work systematically worldwide. Meanwhile, the publishing of A Worldwide Monograph of Swertia and Its Allies also has important meanings for developing and application of western resources. Those meanings are as follow: first, most species are important Tibetan and Chinese medicine that are applied widely in China; second, important chemicals and injections are developed by chemical monomers that are extracted from some Swertia species, this publication not only provided guides for Swertia species identification, but also provided foundation for cultivation of Swertia species, and most important is that it also can offer reference for looking for the new resources; third, most species of the Swertia are flowers, this publication will offer the foundation to plant and promote those flowers as well .
