Paederia is a pantropical genus of 31 species of woody lianas from the family Rubiaceae, with high species’ diversity in both tropical continental Asia and Africa and only two species in the tropical Americas. Nie et al. conduct phylogenetic analyses using sequences of five plastid markers and infer an origin in the Oligocene in tropical continental Asia, probably followed by long-distance dispersal across the Indian Ocean in the early-to-middle Miocene. They infer that the two Neotropical species derived independently in the late Miocene from ancestors of Asia and East Africa, respectively, and conclude that long-distance dispersal may thus be much more common than previously thought, representing a potentially important mechanism in the assembly of modern tropical floras.
