Taxonomic history The Rutaceae was described by the French botanist
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu in his 1789 book
Genera Plantarum. "Rutaceae" remains the name in use (
nomen conservandum) for the family as defined in the
International Plant Names Index. The type genus is
Ruta. In 1896, Engler published a division of the family Rutaceae into seven subfamilies.
Phylogeny Molecular phylogeny shows that the Rutaceae is deeply nested within the
Sapindales. It is sister to the
Meliaceae (mahogany family); the clade containing those two families is in turn sister to the
Simaroubaceae (quassia family). On that analysis, the Rutaceae emerged some 100
mya in the
Upper Cretaceous. Molecular methods have shown that only Aurantioideae can be clearly differentiated from other members of the family based on fruit. They have not supported the
circumscriptions of Engler's three other main subfamilies. In 2012, Groppo et al. divided Rutaceae into only two subfamilies, retaining Cneoroideae but placing all the remaining genera in a greatly enlarged subfamily Rutoideae
s.l. A 2014 classification by Morton and Telmer also retained Engler's Aurantioideae, but split the remaining Rutoideae
s.l. into a smaller Rutoideae and a much larger Amyridoideae
s.l., containing most of Engler's Rutoideae. Until 2021, molecular phylogenetic methods had only sampled between 20% and 40% of the genera of Rutaceae. A 2021 study by Appelhans et al. sampled almost 90% of the genera. The two main
clades recognized by Groppo et al. in 2012 were upheld, but Morton and Telmer's Rutoideae was
paraphyletic and their Amyridoideae was
polyphyletic and did not include the type genus. Applehans et al. divided the family into six subfamilies, shown below in the
cladogram produced in their study. The large subfamily
Zanthoxyloideae was shown to contain distinct clades, but the authors considered that a revised classification at the tribal level was not yet feasible at the time their paper was published. }} == Economically important species ==