Festuca arundinacea Schreber (Gramineae) in Italy: morphological, anatomical, karyological and biochemical analyses

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Abstract
With the aim of improving the knowledge of the taxonomic characters which are peculiar to the species and of filling in the gap concerning the distribution of subspecies and/or varieties in Italy, forty-four natural populations of Festuca arundinacea coming from stations with different geographic-ecological characteristics were studied. Fifty plants per population, grown together in the same environment, were examined karyologically and for their morpho-biometrical characters, some anatomical features of their leaves and the patterns of the storage proteins of the caryopsis. All plants were found to be hexaploid (2n = 42) with the same gross structure of the chromosome pairs. Within all the populations, a high variability of morpho-biometrical char- acters was observed and the distributions according to their frequencies or values were unimodal in all instances. Correlations among characters, when not obvious, were either non-existent or very low. No definite gradient was observed studying the regression of morpho-biometrical characters of the populations on both the altitude and the latitude of their stations of origin. Quite similar results were obtained when analysing the anatomical features of the leaves; plants differing in these features coexisted in most populations and correlations with any morpho-biometrical character were not discernible. Practically the same patterns were obtained in all the populations analysing the storage proteins in the caryopsis by sodium dodecylsulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. It is concluded that all hexaploid entities of F. arundinacea studied form one hologamodeme and have to be ranked under F. arundinacea subsp. arundinacea. On account of the variability of characters observed, the conflicting systematic assessment within F. arundinacea may be called into question and appears to need a careful revision.