Vegetative and Leaf Anatomical Traits for Taxonomic Delimitation of Salacia L. In Sri Lanka

Wins Senevirathne,Pi Hettiarachchi,Dmd Yakandawala

doi:10.3329/bjpt.v28i2.57138

Wins Senevirathne, Pi Hettiarachchi + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3329/bjpt.v28i2.57138

Copy DOI

Abstract

Salacia comprises 200 species throughout the tropical countries. In Sri Lanka, five species of this genus S. chinensis, S. diandra, S. oblonga, S. reticulata and S. acuminatissima are recorded that are considered as the synonyms under S. diandra by Wadhwa in 1996 during the revision of genus. These species are very much similar in vegetative morphology and their flowering is irregular and rare. Due to these reasons, their proper identification and determination are difficult and identification of new combinations of taxonomic characters is necessary. A multivariate analysis was conducted for 98 distinct populations using 20 vegetative and 43 leaf anatomical characters including PCA, PCO, CA, SIMPER and correlation analysis. The results support the recognition of four phenetic groups, which corresponds to species S. chinensis, S. reticulata, S. oblonga and S. diandra. S. acuminatissima that was recognized by Kostermans (1992) was not supported by the analysis and formed a cluster together with S. diandra with no support as a separate cluster. The study failed to recognize any distinct vegetative characters to define these taxa but propose a combination of vegetative or leaf anatomical characters and also highlights the necessity of molecular data to supplement the vegetative and leaf anatomical data to resolve the ambiguity between the S. acuminatissima and S. diandra. Bangladesh J. Plant Taxon. 28(2): 429-439, 2021 (December)

Highlights

Sri Lanka is an island approximately 65,000 km2 in extent, located 29 km south of the southern tip of peninsular India
Principal Component analysis (PCA) for the quantitative variables and Principal Coordinate analysis (PCO) for the quantitative and qualitative variables were conducted under the ordination analysis
According to the PCA, first four principal components with the highest Eigen values are accounted for 73.64% of the cumulative variance and individual contribution of PCs are 36.09, 19.24, 12.78 and 5.54%, respectively (Table 3)

Summary

Introduction

Sri Lanka is an island approximately 65,000 km in extent, located 29 km south of the southern tip of peninsular India. Despite being a relatively small island, Sri Lanka is strikingly diverse in ecosystems due to spatial variation of rainfall, altitude and soil (Punyawardhana, 2004). These in turn have contributed to the very high biodiversity along with endemic fauna and flora. Km) and 3154 flowering plant species are recorded in Sri Lanka of which 894 species are endemic to the country (MOE, 2012). The rich diversity in flowering plants of this country has produced large number of plants with immense economic value. Over 600 species have been used as medicinal plants and large number of them are used in the indigenous systems of medicine (Karunarathne, 2001). The members of the genus Salacia, are considered as a medicinally valuable group of plants that has antimicrobial, anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, nephroprotective, and anti-mutagenic properties (Chawla et al, 2013; Medagama, 2015)

Methods

Results

Conclusion