CYTOTAXONOMY OF SOME TAXA OF THE SOLANACEAE

Abstract

In the present study the systematic relationships of 45 spectes belonging to 15 genera of Solanaceae have been investigated based on the similarities and dissimilarities in 118 attributes obtained from 55 morphologcial, 21 cytological characters and 42 characters derived from seed proteins. The morphological attributes were obtained from the full description of plant habit and the features of different organs i.e. stem, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds. Cytological attributes were obtained from chromosome number, length, centromere position and other criteria of the karyotype. The characters of seed proteins have been obtained from electrophoretic profiles as revealed by their separation using SDS-PAGE.

Evaluation of the systematic relationships has been carried out through the numerical methods for characters of the three lines of evidence using a numerical taxonomic program (NTSYS-pc, V. 1.5) in order to produce three phenograms expressing the phenetic relationships among the species studied. Characters of each two of these three studies have been combined to each other, as well as the three together in order to obtain another four phenograms using the same program. Consequently, seven different phengrams have been produced according to the type of attributes used. Comparisons between the classification produced by all characters combined and the previous taxonomic treatments of the species studied have been made, while otl1er classifications (phenograms) are used to confirm some relationships between taxa.