DISTINGUISHING OF Dendrobium amabile STRAIN BY MORPHOLOGYCAL AND ITS MARKER

Abstract

Kieu orchid is a group of genus Dendrobium orchids, belonging to the tribe Chrysotoxae, section Callista. Currently, the classification of the Kieu orchid group is still not unified. There are different views about the number of Kieu orchid species in Vietnam as well as their kinship. This species Dendrobium amabile is divided into 2 groups with large different conservation and economic values, which are namely the Central Purple Kieu and the Northern Purple Kieu. Our paper focus to investigate and find out results of morphological analysis of 4 varieties of purple Kieu orchid of Vietnam. Furthermore, identifying and analyzing the ITS sequences of the two variants Kieu violet in the central region and Kieu violet in Thai Nguyen Province. Morphological analysis also showed that the northern varieties of the Kieu violet differ from the characteristics of the Kieu violet described in the botanical documents in some morphological details and distribution. Moreover, results of DNA analysis of ITS markers showed that the Central Purple Kieu has a sequence similarity of 99.9% comparing to the ITS sequence of species Dendrobium amabile published on the GenBank, while the Northern Purple Kieu variant has lower similarity and much different in the ITS sequence. However, tree they all belong to a clade with the species Dendrobium amabile and are separated from the rest in the taxonomic. Hence, our results indicate that these taxa could be new species to have further studies to determine the scientific name for the species variable for the Northern Purple Kieu.