Changing of morphological characteristic and biomass properties in Pennisetum purpureum by colchicine treatment

Abstract

Background and Objective: Napier grass had limitation on conventional breeding program due to its self-incompatibility and sterilization effect. The fundamental goal of plant breeding program is to increase chemical composition and biomass yield of Napier grass by insure the yield per unit area and heating value for renewable energy utilization are also increased. In the experiment, the colchicine was applied to induce mutation in Napier grass cultivars in order to increase genetic variability of the varieties for good agricultural characteristics and future chemical component selection. The experiment was aimed to study the effect of colchicine treatment on the change of morphological characteristics, biomass properties and biomass yield of Pennisetum purpureum. Materials and Methods: The experiment was factorial in Complete Randomized Design (CRD) with 35 replications. There were four treatments accessions of Pennisetum purpureum, which were Chiang-Rai 2 (CR2), Chiang-Rai 3 (CR3), Taiwan A148 (TA148) and Tifton with five colchicine concentrations levels of 0.0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3% (w/v) which was applied in each treatments. Colchicine was treated on shoot apical meristem of stem cutting. Results: The experiment found that colchicine treatment significantly affected on plant height, leaf greenness, stem diameter and stomatal size. The CR2, CR3 and Tifton after treated with 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3% (w/v) of colchicine had significantly increased on plant height, leaf biomass and biomass yield. The concentration of colchicine at 0.05% (w/v) significantly increased cellulose and lignin content of Tifton and CR2, respectively. Moreover, the colchicine treatment at 0.2% (w/v) significantly decrease ash content of Tifton. Furthermore, the flow cytometric histograms on DNA content showed the different between non-treated and colchicine treated samples. The concentration of colchicine at 0.1 and 0.2% (w/v) showed similarity pattern of aneuploidy cells. The CR3 at 0.1 and 0.2% (w/v) of colchicine and TA148 at 0.2% (w/v) of colchicine increase the DNA content compared to non-treated sample (the control). Conclusion: Finally, the colchicine treatment showed the improvement on plant morphological yield and yield components in the treated samples which was almost tends to show the dominant characteristic.