Chemophenetic Approach to Selected Senecioneae Species, Combining Morphometric and UHPLC-HRMS Analyses.

Herein, a chemophenetic significance, based on the phenolic metabolite profiling of three (, and ) and two species ( and ), coupled to morphometric data, is presented. A set of twelve morphometric characters were recorded from each plant species and used as predictor variables in a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) model. From a total 75 observations (15 from each of the five species), the model correctly assumed their species' membership, except for 2 observations. Among the studied species, and presented the greatest morphological similarity. A phytochemical profiling of phenolic specialized metabolites by UHPLC-Orbitrap-MS revealed 46 hydroxybenzoic, hydroxycinnamic, and acylquinic acids and their derivatives, 1 coumarin and 21 flavonoids. Hierarchical and PCA clustering applied to the phytochemical data corroborated the similarity of and , observed in the morphometric analysis. This study contributes to the phylogenetic relationships between the tribe Senecioneae taxa and highlights the chemophenetic similarity/dissimilarity of the studied species belonging to and genera.