Welcome to Solanaceae Source

Solanaceae Source aims to provide a worldwide taxonomic monograph of the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The family is of considerable economic importance and contains species that are used as food (potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants), medicines (henbane and deadly nightshades) and in horticulture (petunias). We began this journey with the on-line monograph of all species in the mega-diverse genus Solanum. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Solanum project as part of the Planetary Biodiversity Inventories (PBI) mission from 2004-2009.

In 2011 we added the names for all members of the family to the resource with the collaboration of the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), and are working through these with the help of the Solanaceae community worldwide. This increases the coverage to all 90+ genera of the family and will contribute to diverse projects such as the World Flora On-Line that is contributing the the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. The Solanaceae Source BRAHMS database serves data on names and specimens for the website and is worked on continuously.

The website and database behind it are constantly being updated and improved - we hope you will bear with us as we both improve the site and the data that underpin it. Synonymy may not be perfectly up to date, and some new species have not yet been added.