The ADA clade is the earliest-branching

monophyletic In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic ...

clade of the

flowering plant Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (), commonly called angiosperms. They include all forbs (flowering plants without a woody stem), grasses and grass-like plants, a vast majority of ...

subfamily

Faboideae The Faboideae are a subfamily of the flowering plant family Fabaceae or Leguminosae. An acceptable alternative name for the subfamily is Papilionoideae, or Papilionaceae when this group of plants is treated as a family. This subfamily is widely ...

(or Papilionaceae). Evidence for this clade was sparse until recent

molecular phylogenies Molecular phylogenetics () is the branch of phylogeny that analyzes genetic, hereditary molecular differences, predominantly in DNA sequences, to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships. From these analyses, it is possible to ...

that included basal faboid genera that previously had been poorly sampled.

Description

This clade is composed of a morphologically eclectic collection of genera. It is one of only three clades (the other two being

Swartzieae The tribe Swartzieae is an early-branching monophyletic clade of the flowering plant subfamily Faboideae or Papilionaceae. Traditionally this tribe has been used as a wastebasket taxon to accommodate genera of Faboideae which exhibit actinomorp ...

and the ''Cladrastis'' clade) in Faboideae that lack the 50-Kb

plastid The plastid (Greek: πλαστός; plastós: formed, molded – plural plastids) is a membrane-bound organelle found in the cells of plants, algae, and some other eukaryotic organisms. They are considered to be intracellular endosymbiotic cyanobac ...

DNA inversion that is characteristic of the

Meso-Papilionoideae Meso-Papilionoideae is a monophyletic clade of the flowering plant subfamily Faboideae (or Papilionoideae) that includes the majority of papilionoid legumes. This clade is consistently resolved in molecular phylogenies. It contains many agronomic ...

. The name of this clade is informal and is not assumed to have any particular

taxonomic rank In biological classification, taxonomic rank is the relative level of a group of organisms (a taxon) in an ancestral or hereditary hierarchy. A common system consists of species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain. While ol ...

like the names authorized by the

ICBN The ''International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants'' (ICN) is the set of rules and recommendations dealing with the formal botanical names that are given to plants, fungi and a few other groups of organisms, all those "trad ...

or the ICPN. The clade does not currently have a node-based definition and no morphological

synapomorphies In phylogenetics, an apomorphy (or derived trait) is a novel character or character state that has evolved from its ancestral form (or plesiomorphy). A synapomorphy is an apomorphy shared by two or more taxa and is therefore hypothesized to hav ...

have been identified.

References

ADA clade Plant unranked clades {{Faboideae-stub