The Plant Press

From The Plant Press, Vol. 29, No. 1, January 2026.

Ancient whole genome duplication events influenced the evolution of the ginseng family (Araliaceae)

By Angélica Gallego Narbón

The plant family Araliaceae has shown a great importance for humans, both as a source of ornamental plants such as the common ivy (Hedera helix) and the Japanese aralia (Fatsia japonica), and as a source of medicinal plants such as the ginseng (Panax ginseng). This family is widely distributed across all continents except Antarctica, especially in tropical and subtropical latitudes. Despite the continued research to understand its evolution for several decades, our knowledge is still limited. This is partly a result of the limited species and genetic sampling of seminal studies in the field. However, all the evidence points to an early evolutionary radiation during the evolution of the family associated to whole genome duplication and hybridization between genera, with all of these processes hindering the identification of evolutionary patterns in this family.

The now postdoctoral researcher Angélica Gallego Narbón aimed to disentangle the evolutionary relationships of the ginseng family during her doctoral research in the PlantBEE group (Land Plant Biogeography, Ecology and Evolution) led by Virginia Valcárcel and Mario Fernández-Mazuecos in Universidad Autonóma de Madrid, in collaboration with the Smithsonian researchers Jun Wen and Gabriel Johnson. The results of this international collaboration were recently published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science (16: 1595321; 2025,
 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2025.1595321).

The researchers increased the taxon sampling to nearly 250 species representing 80% of the genera of the family, and improved the genetic sampling using the next generation sequencing technique Hyb-Seq to recover more than 900 nuclear loci and plastomes for each of the sequenced species. The increased sampling resulted in highly resolved nuclear and plastid phylogenies of the family that are topologically incongruent in the deeper nodes. These results provide new insights into the evolution of this family, while supporting the hypothesis of early hybridization between genera.

To better understand the role of hybridization and its relationship with whole genome duplication, the authors compiled a chromosome counts database for the family and assessed ploidy levels based on allelic frequencies, which were used for ancestral character reconstruction and chromosome-dependent diversification models. These analyses provided evidence of at least one whole genome duplication in the early evolution of the ginseng family preceding the origin of two out of three of its most diverse lineages, suggesting that whole genome duplications associated with hybridization were crucial for the evolutionary success of the family Araliaceae.