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Morphological variability in 17 wild elephant foot yam (Amorphophallus paeoniifolius) collections from southwest India

  • Notes on Neglected and Underutilized Crops
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Abstract

Amorphophallus paeoniifolius (Dennst.) Nicolson is a tuberous herb occurring in the wild and cultivated state. Vegetative morphological characters were studied at full foliage stage in 17 accessions of A. paeoniifolius which include two cultivars, 15 wild accessions and a related species, A. dubius Blume. The first principal component (PC) accounted for 42.32% of phenotypic variance followed by second for another 18.38%. Major traits that accounted for more variability in both PC1 and PC2 include offset shape, cormel weight per corm, corm fresh weight, petiole surface pattern and canopy spread. The unweighted pair- group method with mathematical averaging (UPGMA) clustering method revealed three principal clusters which separated all the accessions between Euclidean distances of 0.3–1.6. Both cluster analysis and principal co-ordinate analysis revealed T10, a morphotype of A. paeoniifolius var. campanulatus (Decne.) Sivad. cultivated in Tamil Nadu and P19 accession of A. paeoniifolius var. paeoniifolius from Karnataka as morphologically distinct, which needs further validation on the basis of floral characters or molecular markers and G3 from Gujarat as an immediate ancestor of cultivated elephant foot yam. The genotypic (GCV) and phenotypic (PCV) coefficients of variation, broad sense heritability (h2B) and genetic advance (GA) as a percent of the mean assessed for 18 accessions revealed high heritability estimates. A highly significant (P < 0.01) correlation coefficient between circumference of petiole base and corm diameter, corm height, corm weight, east west spread and north south spread suggests that circumference of petiole and canopy spread are indicators to corm weight and size.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to Dr. (Mrs.) Ashalatha S Nair, Professor and Head, Department of Botany, University of Kerala for providing facilities. Thanks are due to NBPGR, New Delhi for providing A. dubius germplasm. SRA is thankful to the Director, Central Tuber Crops Research Institute (Indian Council of Agricultural Research), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala for granting study leave.

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  1. Department of Botany, University of Kerala, Kariavattom, Thiruvananthapuram, 695 581, India

    Shirly Raichal Anil, E. A. Siril & S. Suhara Beevy

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  1. Shirly Raichal Anil
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  2. E. A. Siril
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Anil, S.R., Siril, E.A. & Beevy, S.S. Morphological variability in 17 wild elephant foot yam (Amorphophallus paeoniifolius) collections from southwest India. Genet Resour Crop Evol 58, 1263–1274 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-011-9752-z

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