The family Fabaceae includes a number of plants that are common in agriculture, including Glycine max ( soybean), Phaseolus (beans), Pisum sativum ( pea), Cicer arietinum ( chickpeas), Vicia faba ( broad bean), Medicago sativa ( alfalfa), Arachis hypogaea ( peanut), Ceratonia siliqua (carob), and Glycyrrhiza glabra ( liquorice). Īlong with the cereals, some fruits and tropical roots, a number of Leguminosae have been a staple human food for millennia and their use is closely related to human evolution. These studies confirm that the Fabaceae are a monophyletic group that is closely related to the families Polygalaceae, Surianaceae and Quillajaceae and that they belong to the order Fabales.

This conclusion has been supported not only by the degree of interrelation shown by different groups within the family compared with that found among the Leguminosae and their closest relations, but also by all the recent phylogenetic studies based on DNA sequences. Recent molecular and morphological evidence supports the fact that the Fabaceae is a single monophyletic family. Fabaceae is the most common family found in tropical rainforests and dry forests of the Americas and Africa. 19,000 known legume species amount to about 7% of flowering plant species. The five largest genera of the family are Astragalus (over 3,000 species), Acacia (over 1,000 species), Indigofera (around 700 species), Crotalaria (around 700 species), and Mimosa (around 400 species), which constitute about a quarter of all legume species. The family is widely distributed, and is the third-largest land plant family in number of species, behind only the Orchidaceae and Asteraceae, with about 765 genera and nearly 20,000 known species. It includes trees, shrubs, and perennial or annual herbaceous plants, which are easily recognized by their fruit ( legume) and their compound, stipulate leaves. The Fabaceae or Leguminosae, commonly known as the legume, pea, or bean family, are a large and agriculturally important family of flowering plants.

Legumes are found in four major biomes: tropical forest, temperate, grass, and succulent. Papilionoideae DC.)įabaceae distribution map.

Nested bean