Green cardamom’s new relatives include two species from Kerala

Newsdesk:

An international team of researchers have identified six species that are close cousins to Elettaria cardamomum, better known as green cardamom. Of the six, four were previously placed in a separate genus, Alpinia, while the remaining two have been newly identified and described from Kerala’s Western Ghats regions.

The findings have been published in a paper ‘The cardamom conundrum resolved: Recircumscription and placement of Elettaria in the only pantropically distributed ginger lineage,’ published in the journal Taxon. The international seven-member team from Denmark, India, Colombia, Czech Republic, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the U.K. included Mamiyil Sabu of the KSCSTE-Malabar Botanical Garden and Institute for Plant Sciences, Kozhikode.