Leyla Hoseinzadeh; Alireza Salami; Mohsen Ebrahimi; Ali Izady
Abstract
Objective: Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is a perennial, sterile, and triploid plant. Moreover, dried saffron stigmas have many uses in the food and medicine industry. Saffron plants propagate by corms due to sterility. Therefore, it has limited diversity and a poor plant breeding background, leading to ...
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Objective: Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is a perennial, sterile, and triploid plant. Moreover, dried saffron stigmas have many uses in the food and medicine industry. Saffron plants propagate by corms due to sterility. Therefore, it has limited diversity and a poor plant breeding background, leading to genetic erosion. As a result, being under severe risk of genetic erosion is an obstacle to the breeding and production of saffron. The objective of this study was to investigate the diversity among saffron ecotypes, to evaluate the correlation between morphological traits and the amounts of secondary metabolites, and to classify the ecotypes.
Methods: A complete randomized block design with two replications in three harvests has been conducted to investigate the biological diversity of 22 saffron accessions collected from different regions of Iran at the Tehran University research farm, Mohamadshahr, Alborz, Iran. The most important morphological traits and amount of secondary metabolites, including crocin, picrocrocin, and safranal, were measured by using high-performance liquid chromatography.
Results: Analysis of variance showed significant differences among accessions for studied traits in three consecutive harvests. Qaenat accession had the highest means of obtaining the most morphological characteristics. The factor analysis based on PCA showed that the two first components explained 97 percent of the total variance of traits. The traits of leaf length, stigma fresh weight, stigma length, and safranal in the first component and picrocrocin, crocin, and petal length in the second component had the most positive role in justifying 66.7 percent of the total variance, respectively. Based on cluster analysis, accessions were divided into five clusters. The Qaenat and Firdos 16 accessions had the most genetic similarity, and the Qaenat and Arak accessions had the farthest genetic distance. Moreover, the studied traits are divided into three clusters, so that the amount of crocin and picrocrocin and petal length are in the first category, the amount of safranal, the length of leaf, length of stigma and length of flower, fresh weight of flower and stigma are in the second category, and the final yield, the total number of flowers, and dry weight of stigma are in the third category.
Conclusion: Although studied accessions were cultivated and preserved in the same geographical environment, they had significant differences at morphological and phytochemical levels. Therefore, it can be concluded that the origin of the observed diversity is the result of the existence of diversity at the genome, transcriptome, or epigenome levels.
Somayeh Ehsanfar; Ali Sorooshzadeh; Seyed Ali Mohammad Modarres-Sanavy; Majid Ghorbani Javid
Abstract
To investigate the effect of polyamines on vegetative and biochemical traits of Crocus sativus L., an experiment was conducted as factorial in a randomized complete block design with three replications in 2015-2016 in Training Field of Tarbiat Modares University with three sizes of corms (3-5, 5-7 and ...
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To investigate the effect of polyamines on vegetative and biochemical traits of Crocus sativus L., an experiment was conducted as factorial in a randomized complete block design with three replications in 2015-2016 in Training Field of Tarbiat Modares University with three sizes of corms (3-5, 5-7 and 7-10 g) and five concentrations of polyamines (zero in control, zero in distilled water, spermidine 0.5 and 1 , putrescine 0.5 and 1 ) as the treatments. Results showed that plants treated with putrescine 0.5 and spermidine 1 mM had the highest germination percentage (96.56 percent) and the highest number of lateral sprouts (average number of 8.33), respectively. The length and weight of the leaves were negatively affected by polyamine treatment. The highest chlorophyll content and corm yield were observed in plants treated with Putrescine 0.5 mM and 1 mM, respectively. The content of starch and soluble carbohydrates in dormant corms at the end of growing season were not affected by polyamines significantly; however, total phenolic and flavonoid content in these corms were respectively decreased and increased as a result of applying polyamines. Having no significant effect on stigma dry weight and picrocrocin content, polyamine treatment increased the number of flowers and crocin content in small corms. It is concluded that to obtain better vegetative and biochemical traits of saffron, corms more than 7 g, treated with putrescine, should be used.
Saeideh Maleki Farahani; Mahdi Aghighi Shahverdi
Abstract
To evaluate the effect of nano-iron chelate and also to make a comparison with effect of EDDHA iron chelate on saffron, an experiment was conducted as factorial based on a randomized complete block design with six treatments and three replications in Shahed University, Tehran in 2011 and 2012. Treatments ...
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To evaluate the effect of nano-iron chelate and also to make a comparison with effect of EDDHA iron chelate on saffron, an experiment was conducted as factorial based on a randomized complete block design with six treatments and three replications in Shahed University, Tehran in 2011 and 2012. Treatments included iron fertilizer (Nano chelate and common chelate) in three levels (zero, 450 and 900 g/hairon). The results showed that all traits except carotenoid, chlorophyll a concentration and leaf width affected by type and amount of iron fertilizer or their interaction. Saffron yield increased by both iron sources (about 50 percent). Application of 10 kg/ha of nano-iron chelate fertilizer, increased dry stigma yield, fresh flower weight, flower number, leaf number, main corm diameter and total corm weight of saffron compared to control though they were in some cases two times compared to control. Totally, results indicated more effectiveness of nano-iron at five kg/ha nano iron chelate fertilizer and 10 kg/ha common iron chelate fertilizer had the same effects on most of the traits. It seems that soil Fe deficiency and nano chelate efficacy in slow releasing may lead to saffron yield increment.