Piperaceae - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The APG III system of 2009 recognizes this family, and assigns it to the order Piperales in the unranked clade magnoliids. The family consists of five genera: Piper, Peperomia, Zippelia, Manekia, and Verhuellia. The previously recognised pacific genus Macropiper, was recently merged into Piper. A tentative cladogram showing relationships based on Wanke et al. (2007) is shown below. This phylogeny was based on 6000 basepairs of chloroplast DNA. Only recently has it become clear that Verhuellia is sister to the other four genera in the family.