Pollen morphometrics of four coffee (Coffea sp.) varieties grown in the Philippines

Issue Date

12-2014

Abstract

Coffee (Coffea sp.) is one of the most valuable commercial crops worldwide. Studying pollen grains may be useful in collecting information for plant morphology and genetics. This study utilized traditional and modern geometric morphometrics to examine pollen grains of four commercially-grown coffee varieties in the Philippines, namely, Coffea arabica, C. canephora, C. liberica var. Liberica and C. liberica var. Dewevrei. Pollen grain samples were examined at 200x magnification using an Olympus Bx43 light microscope. Digital images and measurements of the pollen grains in both polar and equatorial views were taken for morphometric analyses using CellSens and tpsDig2 software. C. arabic was the most distinct variety in terms of parameters, and had the largest pollen while C. liberica var. Liberica had the smallest. C. liberica var. Liberica and C. liberica var. Dewevei were the most similar, but can be separated taxonomically beyond the variety level. C. canephora was more similar to C. arabica than to C. liberica in terms of size measurements, while PCA and CVA plots revealed greater overlap of C. canephora with C. liberica. This study is pioneering in the use of landmark-based analysis to determine variations in pollen morphology. This is also among the first studies to use morphometric analysis on the genus Coffea.

Source or Periodical Title

Philippine Journal of Crop Science

ISSN

0115-463x

Volume

39

Issue

3

Page

1-7

Document Type

Article

Frequency

tri-quarterly

Physical Description

tables, pictures, graphs

Language

English

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