Home – Home – Jornals – Flora and Vegetation of Asian Russia 2021 number 4

Elymus fedtschenkoi, E. nevskii and E. praeruptus are three morphologically similar species traditionally assigned to the informal “Elymus semicostatus group” and distributed in open habitats in the mountainous regions of Central Asia, including the Russian Gorny Altai. There are no data on the finding of E. praeruptus within Russia to date. The work provides a detailed analysis of the history of synonymy of the studied species. Their close relationship is confirmed not only by morphological similarity, but also by the high numbers of bivalents per cell (10-12) in meiosis in interspecific hybrids (Salomon, 1993). Analysis of the variability of endosperm proteins in individual caryopses by SDS-electrophoresis showed the following: a) each of the three species has internal polymorphism, which makes it possible to effectively study inter- and intrapopulation specificity even using non-viable material; b) differences within the accessions of E. fedtschenkoi - E. nevskii are more pronounced with geographic remoteness than depending on the formal species; c) the accessions E. praeruptus from Gissar-Alai had completely unique sets of components, and the visual coincidence of the REM values with other accessions, in our opinion, may be of a random nature. According to the revealed polymorphism of ISSR markers, E. fedtschenkoi and E. nevskii have a distinct genetic similarity, while E. praeruptus is noticeably distant from this pair of species. Probably, biotypes with the trait “long lemma’s awns” (up to 25 mm), attributed to E. fedtschenkoi s. str., together with biotypes with the trait “short lemma’s awns” (1-6 mm), which are classified as E. nevskii s. str., should be attributed to a unified complex E. nevskii s.l.