Jon Bennett1, Lynn Bohs2, John Clark3, Sandra Knapp1, Michael Nee4, David Spooner5 & Lisa Walley1
1 Department of Botany, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, United Kingdom
2 Department of Biology, University of Utah, 257 South 1400 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
3 Botany Department, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, P.O.Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013, USA
4 The New York Botanical Garden, 200th Street and Kazimiroff Blvd., Bronx, NY 10458, USA
5 Department of Horticulture, University of Wisconsin, 1575 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Large plant genera typically lack up to date, critical monographic treatments due to the practical difficulties of studying them in their entirety. The most recent comprehensive worldwide monograph of Solanum (Solanaceae) was completed over 150 years ago, and accounts for only a small proportion of the estimated 1500 species currently recognised. The PBI Solanum project is one of four major monographic projects funded by the US National Science Foundation and the All Species Foundation and aims to provide a complete species-level taxonomic monograph of the genus. It is a collaboration between the University of Utah, the Natural History Museum, London, the New York Botanical Garden and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a number of Solanaceae specialists worldwide. Advances in the dissemination of information via the internet are being harnessed to provide a web-accessible database of species names, plant descriptions and literature, interactive identification keys, digital images and a database of herbarium collections, as well as providing links to Solanaceae resources in the fields of molecular biology and genomics.