Caladium Experiment

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CALADIUM Caladiums (Caladium × hortulanum Birdsey, Araceae Juss.) are tropical decorative aroids regularly used as potted plants or for displaying colour in the landscape. Caladiums are grown for their colourful foliage in containers. Foliage colour ranges from white to pink, dark red and rose. Colour patterns are with green margins, a netted venation with colourful interveinal areas, or a solid leaf colour with contrasting spots or blotches. It is the chief floricultural tuber crop found in Florida. They are found in a range of leaf colours, colour patterns, size and shapes, and plant heights as a result of hybridization works which started in late 1800’s using Caladium bicolor (Ait.) Venten, C. picturatum C. Koch & Bouche , C. schombungkii …show more content…

Results showed that a single locus with three allels determined the the main vein colour in caladium. The locus was designated as V, with allels Vx, Vw and Vg for red, white and green main veins, respectively. The white vein allele was dominant over the green allele, but it was recessive to the red vein allele, which was dominant over both white and green vein allele; thus the dominance order of the alleles is V x> Vw > Vg. Segregation data indicated that four major red-veined cultivars were heterozygous with the genotypes VxVg, and that one white-veined cultivar was homozygous and one other white-veined cultivar and one breeding line were heterozygous. The observed segregation data confirmed that the three leaf shapes in caladium were controlled by two co-dominant alleles at one locus, designated as F and f, for fancy and strap leaves, respectively. The skewedness of leaf shape segregation in some of the crosses implied the existence of other factors that might contribute to the formation of leaf shape. Contingency chi-squares tests for goodness-of-fit indicated that the five observed segregation patterns for leaf shape and main vein colour fit well to the expected ratio assuming that two co-dominant and three dominant/recessive alleles control leaf shape and main vein colour and they are inherited

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