• XUAN SHE

Articles written in Journal of Genetics

• A mixed ploidy natural population of Amorphophallus muelleri provides an opportunity to trace the evolution of Amorphophallus karyotype

Amorphophallus, a perennial herb belongs to the family Araceae, and is widely distributed in Asia and Africa. As anagricultural crop, it has been cultivated and consumed for ${\sim}$ 2000 years in China. Previous studies have found that there are chromosomenumber and ploidy changes in this genus, but there are a few reports on the evolution of different karyotypes. For this study, we collected 37samples of a wild population of Amorphophallus muelleri from Myanmar and analysed their karyotypes. The karyotype analysis showedthat it is a population with mixed chromosome numbers and ploidy, with four karyotypes of 2n = 24, 26, 28 and 39. Combining the resultsof this study with previous literature, we speculate that karyotypes with 2n = 26 may be the common ancestor, and further the other threekaryotypes were evolved from this by various ways. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to put forward the hypothesis of theevolution of those four karyotypes together. On the other hand, by using inter-simple sequence repeat marker-based unweighted pair groupmethod with arithmetic mean cluster analysis, we found that these individuals of four karyotypes can be divided into four correspondingcategories, indicating that they have been differentiated at the genome, providing a theoretical basis for future use of these wild germplasmresources.

• # Editorial Note on Continuous Article Publication

Posted on July 25, 2019