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Morphological characterization in the genus Passiflora L.: an approach to understanding its complex variability

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Abstract

Morphological variation was studied in 124 accessions from 61 Passiflora L. species. Twenty-four quantitative descriptors selected for their high variation among subgenera were submitted to a principal component analysis. The first principal component (32% of total variance) was associated with flower length and secondarily with floral cup constriction, the second (27%) with flower width and bract shape, and the third (14%) with peduncle branching, stem width, and leaf length, which relates it to the differentiation of subgenera Astrophea and Deidamioides. The projection of accessions in the resulting tridimensional space consistently separates the four subgenera, as well as supersection Tacsonia of subgenus Passiflora. A neighbor joining analysis, on a selection of 32 qualitative traits and four categorized quantitative variables, clustered species according to their chromosome number and, within subgenus Passiflora, separated supersections Tacsonia (pollinated by the sword-billed hummingbird) and Distephana (pollinated by shorter-billed hummingbirds) from all other, bee-pollinated, species. Thus, the morphological study allows separating the effects of genome evolution from those of more recent and independent coevolutions concerning the pollination syndromes of supersections Tacsonia and Distephana. Within subgenus Decaloba, diverging subclusters are consistent with supersections and particular sections, with the partial exception of supersection Decaloba. Within supersection Tacsonia, subclusters correspond to one or two sections, pointing to overclassification in the current taxonomy. Among the bee-pollinated species of subgenus Passiflora, only supersection Laurifolia is clearly validated. Most of these results are consistent with molecular phylogenetic studies, except for interspecific relations among bee-pollinated species of subgenus Passiflora, which appear particularly difficult to classify.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by Colciencias and the Colombian Ministry for Environment, with support from the Research Center of the Colombian Coffee Grower Federation (Cenicafé) through the projects: “Conservación y utilización de los recursos genéticos de pasifloras” and “Estudio de la diversidad de las Passifloraceae y Caricaceae de la zona cafetera de Colombia.” The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Gines-Mera Fellowship Foundation (CIAT—CBN). We are also grateful to Gustavo Morales (Botanical Garden of Bogotá, José Celestino Mutis) for his help with tacsos during collecting trips of Tasconia species. We thank John MacDougal and an anonymous reviewer for their significant contribution to the last version of the manuscript.

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  1. Departamento de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Palmira (UNAL)/International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), via a Candelaria, Palmira, 763533, Valle del Cauca, Colombia

    John Ocampo Pérez

  2. CIRAD, UMR AGAP, Avenue Agropolis, 34398, Montpellier, France

    Geo Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge

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  1. John Ocampo Pérez
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Correspondence to John Ocampo Pérez.

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This study was funded by Colombian Ministry for Environment (Grant Number CEN-303-2003).

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Handling editor: Ricarda Riina.

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Online Resource 1. List of accessions of the genus Passiflora L. used in this study. Taxonomy according to infrageneric classification proposed by Killip (1938) and emends by Escobar (1988a, b, 1989) and MacDougal (1994).

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Ocampo Pérez, J., Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, G. Morphological characterization in the genus Passiflora L.: an approach to understanding its complex variability. Plant Syst Evol 303, 531–558 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-017-1390-2

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