Morphological diversity in varieties of Catharanthus Roseus [L.] G. Don.

Abstract

Catharanthus roseus is a prominent medicinal plant containing quantities expressive of alkaloids vincristine and vinblastine in its tissues. For this reason its use has been used in the treatment of cancer patients. Also it plays a significant role with use in floriculture, due to its variety of flower colors, because they are used more and more in landscaping projects. To potentiate its use, know its genetic diversity becomes important to optimization of the improvement of species. Thus, this work aimed to analyze the effect of 17 quantitative morphological variables to the distinction genotypes of C. roseus and to evaluate the genetic variability. Therefore, an experiment was carried out, evaluating ten commercial varieties of C. roseus, in greenhouse, in a randomized block design, with three replications. After 100 days of planting, the morphological profiles of the varieties were analyzed using image phenotyping. Through the analysis of genetic dissimilarity, the varieties were categorized into three groups, and the leaf traits were the ones that most contributed to this categorization. Therefore, the morphological characterization was efficient to characterize the phenotypic variability of the evaluated genotypes.