Electronic Journal of Plant Breeding

Dianthus caryophyllus is an important floricultural crop in temperate climates and worldwide popular as cut-flowers for its variegated petal's colour. The development of this cultivar with more desirable floral characteristics and higher productivity are also very much important. Their identifications as well as taxonomy had been studied in the literatures using different laboratory methods. Both morphological and/or genetical characteristics were considered in the reported studies. However, to the best of our knowledge, there does not exist any study involving an image analysis based approach. For this, we undertook the mutation breeding programme with selected chemical mutagens, viz. Colchicine (COL), Ethyl Methane Sulphonate (EMS) and Maleic Hydrazide (MH) with different concentrations. These mutagens were applied on the young leaves of M₂ plants of Dianthus cultivar. The results of the present study on peculiar morphological architectures of leaf stomata in Dianthus at different concentrations of three potent chemical mutagens were analyzed on the basis of their Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images which is more informative than the classical approach. Number of stomata and its shape, aperture length and its dimension, characteristics of guard cells in both dorsal and ventral surfaces of leaf also varied from treatment to treatment.