Seed morphological diversity of Pedicularis (Orobanchaceae) and its taxonomic significance
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Seed morphological diversity of Pedicularis (Orobanchaceae) and its taxonomic significance Min-Lu Liu • Wen-Bin Yu • De-Zhu Li Robert R. Mill • Hong Wang
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Received: 7 August 2012 / Accepted: 7 April 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Wien 2013
Abstract Mature seeds of 109 species of Pedicularis representing 13 groups according to Tsoong’s infra-generic classification were investigated using light microscopy (LM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The largest seeds occurred in P. superba (4.82 ± 0.32 mm 9 2.18 ± 0.18 mm) and the smallest in P. crenata (0.95 ± 0.16 mm 9 0.72 ± 0.08 mm). The individual seed weight ranged from 0.20 to 9.52 mg. There were two types of primary ornamentation, i.e. reticulate and undulate. Reticulate seeds were found in all examined species except for P. pantlingii and P. confluens. The reticulate seeds were divided into three subtypes, i.e. cristatereticulate, regular-reticulate and membranous-reticulate. Among them, the cristate-reticulate and the undulate primary ornamentation are firstly reported. The inner tangential wall ornamentation was categorized into granulate, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00606-013-0821-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M.-L. Liu W.-B. Yu D.-Z. Li H. Wang (&) Key Laboratory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650201, China e-mail: [email protected] M.-L. Liu W.-B. Yu D.-Z. Li H. Wang Plant Germplasm and Genomics Center, Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650201, China M.-L. Liu Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China R. R. Mill Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH3 5LR, Scotland, UK
ruminate or striate. Seed characters seem to support the transfer of Pedicularis to Orobanchaceae from traditional Scrophulariaceae. Seed length, individual seed weight, primary ornamentation and inner tangential wall ornamentation were considered as potentially useful characters for infra-generic classification. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analyses indicated a clustering of some species in group 1 (Sceptrum) and all species in group 6 (Cyathophora), respectively. However, seed data were not highly congruent with Tsoong’s classification for delimitation of existing groups. Some characters, such as seed shape, primary ornamentation, inner tangential wall ornamentation and epidermal cell shape could be applied to identification of some species in this genus. Keywords Pedicularis Orobanchaceae Seed characters NMDS Taxonomic significance
Introduction The hemiparasitic genus Pedicularis (Orobanchaceae) is one of the largest genera of flowering plants, and it comprises more than 600 species mainly distributed throughout the montane and alpine zones of the northern hemisphere (Li 1948; Tsoong 1963; Wang et al. 2003; Ree 2005). At least 364 species of Pedicularis occur in C
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