Typological and Frequency Based Study of Opaline Silica (Phytolith) Deposition in Two Common Indian Sorghum L. Species
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Typological and Frequency Based Study of Opaline Silica (Phytolith) Deposition in Two Common Indian Sorghum L. Species Durgesh Kumar Tripathi • Sanjay Mishra • Devendra Kumar Chauhan • Satyendra Prakash Tiwari Chitranjan Kumar
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Received: 4 May 2012 / Revised: 16 July 2012 / Accepted: 31 July 2012 / Published online: 26 August 2012 Ó The National Academy of Sciences, India 2012
Abstract Sorghum of the family Poaceae is one of the important cereal crops of India which accumulate silica in the form of phytoliths. Silica which forms phytoliths has manifold role in the crop plants. It enhances the crop quality, yield, growth and protects the plant from various biotic and abiotic hurdles. Present paper provides brief observations of the morphology, diversity and frequency of opal phytoliths in leaves of Sorghum bicolor and Sorghum halepense. Among all the morphotypes, bilobate phytoliths showed the highest frequency in both species while other forms like trapezoids, prickle hair, micro hair, long micro hair, epidermal long cells, stomata, bulliform and parallelepipedal phytoliths are present in minimal range. Some phytoliths like micro hair and polylobate phytoliths are not present in S. bicolor while they are present in S. halepense. The frequency of all the phytoliths of both the species is remarkably varied whereas the morphometry of these phytoliths is slightly varied. Therefore, these results could contribute in evaluating their taxonomic demarcation as well as will help to investigate their history of cultivation. Keywords
Phytolith Poaceae Silica Sorghum
D. K. Tripathi S. Mishra D. K. Chauhan (&) S. P. Tiwari Department of Botany, University of Allahabad, Allahabad 211002, India e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] C. Kumar The National Academy of Sciences, India, Allahabad 211002, India
Introduction Silica is the second most common element in the earth’s crust after oxygen [1]. It is a non-essential but one of the most beneficial plant nutrients [1, 2] absorbed by plants from the soil in the form of monosilicic acid, (Si (OH)4) through roots and translocated to the aerial parts of the plants via xylem [3]. Silica is deposited in all parts of the plant and takes a characteristic shape in and between the plant cells [4, 5]. After the proper accumulation in the different parts of the plant, silicic acid is polymerized by the loss of water and is lastly deposited beneath the cuticle, where it forms a cuticle-silica double layer or gets deposited in some particular cells like silica short cells, cork cells, bulliform cells, mesophyll cells, fibers, sclereids, tracheids, trichome and trichome bases in the aerial parts of certain plants [6, 7]. These microscopic bodies are called phytoliths. The presence of phytoliths in grasses is well-known and is widely mentioned in the literature [6, 8–10]. The phytoliths extracted from living members of Poaceae have been subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis [11–14]. Grass reference sets of phytoliths have also been dev
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