Morphological traits as variety descriptors of Arachis pintoi

Abstract

-Arachis pintoi is outstanding in the present agricultural scenery for adapting well to varied environments and in view of its high yield of quality fodder. It is therefore used as forage crop in different countries. In the last 15 years, more than ten cultivars were released in different countries; none of them is protected in Brazil. To protect a cultivar the minimum descriptors of the species must be determined. In this study, F 2 populations of A. pintoi were evaluated by the number of bristles on the petiole, number of bristles on the basal and distal leaflets, length and width of internodes, length and width of basal and distal leaflets, and flower color. The objective was the determination of morphological traits for variety identification of forage peanut. The performance of the F 2 progenies was trait-dependent. The heritability of all traits was high, indicating that a great part of the variation observed in these genotypes is genetic. This reinforces the usefulness of these traits as variety descriptors of forage peanut.

Organography of greenhouse and field accessions of wild Arachisspecies (section Arachis)

“…Principal component analysis showed that 10 morphological descriptors were important in explaining the distribution of accessions (in order of importance): length (n + 1), number of flowers, height of main stem (n), right apical leaflet length, right apical leaflet width, diameter (n), seed length, anthocyanin pigmentation of branches, bristles on rachis, and standard petal base color. In fact, several studies have shown that characters such as branch length, leaflet length, and leaflet width are important in discriminating accessions of Arachis species (Veiga et al 2001;Castro et al 2007;Fávero et al 2015a, Fávero et al 2015b). For instance, Costa (2012) 4 examined six floral structures in several wild Arachis species, all of which were also evaluated in this study except for A. villosa and A. ipaënsis, and found significant differences in all floral structures for all species.…”