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Pak. J. Bot., 48(3): 1051-1060, 2016.

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POLLEN MORPHOLOGY OF THE SUBFAMILY ARECOIDEAE GRIFF. (FAMILY-ARECACEAE) FROM PAKISTAN AND KASHMIR

ABID ARZOO RASHEED^1*, ANJUM PERVEEN¹, ROOHI ABID¹ AND MUHAMMAD QAISER²

Abstract: Pollen morphological characters are potentially informative in the systematic of monocotyledons including (Arecaceae), at supra and infra familial level. The pollen morphology of 8 species (subfamily Arecoideae) clearly shows that the qualitative pollen characters (such as aperture, exine pattern and shape) are found to be taxonomically important as compared to the quantitative characters (such as size of the grain and exine thickness).Considerable pollen variations have been found within the subfamily Arecoideae with regard to size, shape, aperture type and exine pattern. For instance, 7 out of 8 species have monosulcate pollen (i.e., 87.5%) and a remaining species (viz., Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) have trichotomosulcate pollen. The pollen are frequently elliptical, but in some cases rounded-triangular pollen were also found. Similarly, there is a great diversity in exine pattern such as punctate, reticulate, vermiculate, spinose, rugulate and perforate or combination of these types have also been found, but the most predominant pattern is the reticulate type.

On the basis of pollen aperture, size and exine pattern, four pollen types have been recognized such as Areca-type, Dypsis-type, Cocos-type and Elaies-type. The data obtained from the palynological studies have been analyzed by Agglomerative cluster analysis choosing the Euclidean distance and Ward’s method for a group linkage method. The objective of the present work is to classify studied taxa on the basis of pollen characters and to quantify the species relationships representing the subfamily Arecoideae based on numerical techniques.

Key words: Pollen, Areceae Drude, Cocoeae Mart. and Roystoneae Cook
 

¹Centre for Plant Conservation, University of Karachi, Karachi-75270, Pakistan

²University of Karachi, Karachi-75270, Pakistan

^*Corresponding author e-mail: abidkuh@gmail.com