PALYNOLOGICAL STUDY OF CULTIVATED AND NATIVE PALMS FROM PAKISTAN AND KASHMIR

The present work gives a detail account of pollen morphology of family Palmae \ud including its taxonomic revision.The taxonomic studies follow the recent classification of \ud Dransfield et al., 2005 & 2008, which based on phylogenetic studies. A total of 28 \ud species representing 21 genera distributed in 3 subfamilies and 10 tribes are known from \ud Pakistan and Kashmir. All the taxa valid or synonyms have been typified with the help of \ud literatures. The detail morphological descriptions of the studied taxa including the \ud artificial generic and specific keys are also given. A description of the range of pollen \ud morphological variation by using Light Microscope (LM) and Scanning Electron \ud Microscope (SEM) have been carried out. \ud Considerable pollen variations have been found within the family with regard to \ud size, shape, aperture type and exine pattern. However, a large number of species have \ud monosulcate pollen (i.e., 25 out of 27) show the highest percentage (92.5%). Whereas, \ud disulcate and trichotomosulcate pollen is present in a single species each viz., Calamus \ud tenuis Roxb. and Elaeis guineensis Jacq.,respectively. The shape as seen in polar view is \ud frequently elliptical, but in some cases rounded-triangular or circular pollen is also found. \ud Pollen shows a wide range in the size, the longest axis of pollen ranging from 15- 60 µm, \ud averaging 30- 50 µm. These palm species also reveals a great diversity in exine pattern \ud such as punctate, reticulate, vermiculate, verrucose, spinose, regulate and, perforate \ud (ranging from fine to coarse, and with sparse to dense distribution) or combination of \ud these types have also been found, but the most predominant pattern being the reticulate \ud type (terminology according to Erdtman).Muri more or less flat or rounded, simple \ud baculate to multibaculate. \ud Pollen morphological characters are potentially informative in the systematics of \ud monocotyledons including Palmae, both above and below the family level. The \ud qualitative pollen characters (such asaperture, exine pattern and shape) are found to be \ud taxonomically important as compared to the quantitative characters (such as size and \ud exine thickness of pollen). On the basis of the combination of pollen characters, the \ud following pollen types have been recognized such as Areca -type, Dypsis- type, Cocus\ud type, Elaies-type, Calamus-type, Bismarkia-type, Borassus-type, Brahea-type and \ud Phoenix-type. Key to the genera based on pollen characters and pollen types are also \ud given. In addition, photographs of represented plants and microphotographs of pollen are \ud incorporated to show the diagnostic features and convienience of identification. \ud The data obtained from the palynological studies have been numerically analyzed \ud to find out the interrelationships among all the taxa of the family Palmae