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Natural Variability in Some Functional Traits of Hermaphrodite Jatropha

Aruna R Prakash, Ravi Prakash CH, Sarnam Singh, Arup Ghosh and Pradeep K Agarwal

To assess the genotypic and phenotypic diversity present in Jatropha curcas, a large number of Candidate Plus Trees (CPTs) were collected from various locations of different agricultural zones of India. J. curcas is normally a monoecious with inflorescence of unisexual flowers but one CPT from the existing pool showed hermaphroditic nature bearing bisexual flowers. Hermaphrodite plants showed significant increase in various functional traits like plant height, number of branches, leaf length, leaf width, leaf thickness, fresh weight of leaf, dry weight of leaf, leaf dry mass content, guard cell length, chlorophyll contents, stomatal conductance, net photosynthetic rate and leaf transpiration rate as compared to normal plants. Based on the results obtained from the present study, it is suggested that hermaphrodite plants may be more useful for production of increased biomass as compared to monoecious plants of J. curcas. Flow cytometry analysis revealed that genome size of plants of hermaphrodite was higher than monoecious Jatropha and the ratio was close to 2:3 of monoecious and hermaphrodite plants.