Researchers from China and Africa jointly discover new species of African Tofu genus

July 14, from China Kexue Yuan Wuhan Botanical Garden was informed that the park in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya, Labiatae premna found a new species, officially named in Kenya and the Philippines Greig Charles County Simba coastal forest areas
.

According to reports, the Lamiaceae is the largest family in the Lamiformes, with more than 200 genera and more than 7000 species
.
Tofu genus is mainly distributed in tropical and subtropical areas of the Old World, and is found in Africa, Asia, Australia, and various islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans

Last year, with the support of the China-Africa Joint Research Center project, the National Museum of Kenya organized a field survey.
Dr.
Veronicah Mutele Ngumbau, who graduated from the Wuhan Botanical Garden, collected a rare woody vine of the genus Tofu in coastal areas of Kenya.
It is obviously different from Any kind that has been recorded in East Africa
.

After checking and comparing with all the specimens of this genus in the East African Herbarium, it was discovered that Mwadime Nyange, a young plant researcher at the museum, also collected such plant specimens from the same location in 2019, but was not named at that time
.

Subsequently, Dr.
Ngumbau and his doctoral supervisor, Hu Guangwan, conducted further comparative studies, and consulted with postdoctoral fellow Li Bo, an expert in plant taxonomy of this genus, and determined that this rare plant is an unnamed new species, which is similar to the recorded Premnachrysoclada (Bojer ) Gürke and P.
tanganyikensis Moldenke are the most similar, but there are obvious differences
.

The life form of this new plant is climbing shrubs or woody vines, old stems with thorns, branchlets, petioles and inflorescences with dense golden-brown dendritic pubescent hairs, and short cymes on the lateral and terminal branches.
Calyx is tubular, about 3 mm long, lobes wide triangular, about 1 mm long, densely covered with dark brown dendrites pubescent
.

These characteristics are obviously different from the related species of this genus and its species, so it is determined as a new species with outstanding characteristics that has not been described
.
In view of the important role Mwadime Nyange, a plant researcher at the National Museum of Kenya, played in the discovery of this species, and his long-term investigation and research on Kenya’s flora, and his important contributions, the new plant was named after him.

It is reported that the research results have been published in Phytotaxa, an international journal of plant taxonomy.