Fruit morphological and micro-morphological study of the Anchusa species (Boraginaceae) in Iran

With its four species, Anchusa is one of the weedy genera of Boraginaceae in Iran. Its species are distributed in different habitats. In this study, the fruit morphological and micro-morphological features of the Anchusa taxa have been considered, so as to evaluate their diagnostic value. Eight qualitative and quantitative fruit features from 12 accessions of A. italica, A. strigosa, A. arvensis and A. aegyptica have been studied by stereomicroscope and SEM. Statistical results have shown that this set of characters provides an efficient identification key. The most important factors comprise such characters as nutlet length and width, nutlet length-to-width ratio, nutlet shape and position (eliosome condition) which exercise a major effect on the observed variations. This is the first study of the Anchusa species of Iran.