Solanaceae: the Nightshade Family

Rank-smelling mostly glandular herbs or less often vines, shrubs or even trees, with alternate usually simple leaves, colorless juice and often prickles.  Inflorescence cyme-like (central flower developing first) or single flowers borne in leaf axils. Flowers generally showy and insect-pollinated, nearly always regular and perfect (bisexual), with sepals fused in a 5-lobed tube and 5 petals partially united to form a symmetrical corolla.  Stamens 5, attached to the base of the corolla tube, alternate with the lobes.  Pistil 1, ovary superior (above the point of insertion of the floral whorls), ovules attached to the central axis of the usually2-chambered ovary, style 1, single stigma often 2-lobed.  Fruit a capsule or berry, seeds small, flattened. and numerous.

Around 80 genera and 3,000 species, often weedy and well-adapted to disturbed habitats, concentrated in the New World near the family's center of distribution in Central and South America, but distributed world-wide in tropical, subtropical, and temperate regions.  Various alkaloids present (nicotine, atropine, hyoscyamine, scopolamine).  Family of great economic importance because of numerous food plants (potato, tomato, eggplant, ground-cherry, bell pepper), condiments (chili, tabasco, cayenne peppers), species with medicinal, hallucinogenic or poisonous properties(tobacco, mandrake, henbane, deadly nightshade, Jimson-weed), and ornamentals (petunia, painted tongue, cup flower, butterfly flower, Browallia, Brunfelsia, Cestrum).

To date 9 species of this family have been collected in the Oapan, San Juan Tetelcingo, and Ameyaltepec area, belonging to the genera Datura (2 species), Nicotiana (2 species), Physalis (2 species), and Solanum (3 species).