A Comparison of Isozyme Patterns of Morphological Variants in the Lichen Umbilicaria muhlenbergii (Ach.) Tuck.

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Abstract
Thalli of Umbilicaria muhlenbergii randomly collected from five collection sites in the Muskoka region of Ontario, Canada were sorted into six morphological classes on the basis of vegetative and apothecial characters. These thalli were pretreated with acetone to remove extracellular phenolics and subsequently crude protein extracts from them were subjected to isoelectric focusing and specific enzyme staining. Relative band frequencies were determined and transformed to arcsine values and paired t-tests were performed to determine whether there were significant frequency differences among different morphological types. There were 57 bands of enzyme activity in the eight enzyme systems assayed and of these 23 were consistently present in all samples. At .ltoreq. 0.05 there were no significant differences in banding patterns among morphological classes nor were there differences among collection sites. Cluster analysis, however, showed five distinct groups corresponding to groups of thalli collected at the five sites. Morphological classes appeared to represent different stages in development.