Chemical and Genetic Diversity of Some Ligularia Species (Compositae) in Northwestern Yunnan and Sou

1Introduction Ligularia Cass., (Compositae) is a highly diversified genus, and more than 100 species of which are distributed in the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and adjacent areas. Ligularia species have been studied with respect to secondary metabolites, and many sesquiterpenes of the furanoeremophilane type have been isolated from them. In order to find correlates among these variations, and ultimately understand the diversity-generating mechanism of Ligularia species in the Hengduan Mountains, we initiated an extensive study that uses furanoeremophilanes as a chemical index and the DNA sequence as a genetic index. Furanoeremophilanes have been detected conventionally by Ehrlich' s test, which has been used in a search for novel natural products. As for the DNA sequence, we determined the nucleotide sequence of the atpB-rbcL intergenic region in the present study.