Indução de poliploidia em Lippia alba (MILL.) N. E. Br. (Verbenaceae)

Abstract

L. alba is an important medicinal plant that belongs to the family Verbenaceae and is popularly known as falsa melissa or erva cidreira. This species has two features that are very important, it is rich in essential oils of economic interest and is a polyploid complex, with chromosome numbers 2n= 30, 38, 45, 60 and 90. Thus, L. alba is an interesting species, for both the applied and basics research, for plant breeding (improving essential oils) and for evolutionary studies. The aim of this work was to induce artificial polyploid L. alba plants for improvement and evolutionary studies. Biological material was constituted by an accession of L. alba (BGEN02 2n=2x=30). This accession was employed to produce autotetraploid plants (2n=4x=60). Plants were propagated by in vitro tissue culture in MS hormone free culture medium. For the colchicine treatment, colchicine solution was mixed with MS medium and the nodal segments were inoculated. The explants were washed three times in distilled water and inoculated in MS medium colchicine free to after ploidy analysis by flow cytometry. Three polyploidy induction experiments were made: experiment 1, experiment 2 and experiment 3. In 1 and 2 experiments the ploidy analysis were made after explant organogenesis (40 DAI) and in experiment 3, flow cytometry was made immediately after colchicine exposure at short time intervals to monitoring the ploidy changes in this initial period. In experiment 1, several colchicine concentrations were used to obtaining information about the best concentrations to perform following experiments. The best result was obtained by 0,2%. This concentration and a ten times low concentration (0,02%) were used in experiment 2, to compare the effects of high and low concentrations. These two colchicne concentrations were used also in experiment 3 in which 4C and 8C percentiles were used to inferring the ploidy level. Polyploids with a length of approximately 6 cm were acclimatized in substrate for planting BioPlant®. In experiment 1, the ploidy analysis by flow cytometry of polyploidy induction experiments revealed polyploids in treatments with colchicine at concentrations of 0.2% and 0.5%, and the concentration that produced a greater number of plants with altered ploidy was 0.2%.Although the strongest treatments caused more ploidy changes, they caused higher mortality too. From the results of experiment 3, we concluded that 0.2% concentration caused increasing in the percentage of cells in 4C and 8C, which means polyploidy. This result corroborates the findings in experiment 1 and 2, in which the treatment of 0.2% produced more polyploids and mixoploids plants. Therefore, it is concluded that (1) this study was successful in inducing L. alba artificial autotetraploids using colchicine and the plant tissue culture techniques; (2) the concentrations of 0.2% and 0.5% colchicine were able to produce autotetraploids plants of this species, and (3) the high concentrations exhibited higher ploidy change effect on the explants L. alba than the low concentrations.