Morphological Characterization of Phalaenopsis spp. and Hybrids from Indonesia

Abstract

The existence of Phalaenopsis species had declined in the wild. Efforts to preserve the species with artificial propagation through crosses to produce a better crop than the parents, often fail because of incompatibility of the parents. This could be minimized by performing characterization to determine the relationship between parental crosses. The purpose of this research was to study the morphological characters of 30 genotypes (five genotypes of Phalaenopsis species, i.e. Phal. violacea, Phal. tetraspis, Phal. amboinensis, Phal. modesta, and Phal. cornu-cervi, and 25 hybrid genotypes found in Indonesia). Morphological characterization was executed in accordance with the type of roots, stem, leaf, and flower using UPOV guidelines and Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCA). The results showed that the 70 morphological characters could be separated into 490 sub-characters that can be divided into 484 polymorphic sub-characters (98.78%) and six monomorphic subcharacters (1.22%). Data analysis with NTSYS program showed that there were eight clusters with 42% of coefficient similarity. The five Phalaenopsis species formed into one cluster. The similarity coefficient between Phalaenopsis spp. and the 25 hybrids was only 30%, 29-70% within species, and 39-64% between the hybrids. Matrix correlation of morphological markers value (r) was 0.88, showed goodness of fit for resemblance coefficient. The PCA clustering was not in line to those identified by the NTSYS tree cluster analysis.