Morphological Characterization of Purple Yam (Dioscorea alata) in Purwodadi Botanic Garden

Abstract

Dioscorea spp. (Yam) is an edible tuber plant from the Dioscoreaceae family. There are around 600 species of Dioscorea spp., one of them is Dioscorea alata. D. alata has a wide range of morphological characteristics, including shape, size, skin color, flesh, and tuber texture. This research focused on D. alata with purple tuber flesh. This study aims to reveal the diversity of D. alata in Purwodadi Botanical Garden based on its morphological characteristics. Characterization is an important aspect of identifying D. alata diversity. Characterization was performed on six D. alata accessions from the Purwodadi Botanical Garden, DA 28, DA 36, DA 57, DA 86, DA-SB, and DA-Tr. Morphological characterization can be divided into qualitative and quantitative stem and leaf properties. The morphological feature data were processed using NTSys 2.11a software. The observation results showed that D. alata from different accessions had diverse morphological characteristics such as stem color, wing color, leaf margin color, leaf vein color, petiole color, and petiole wings color. The dendrogram results showed that DA 36 and DA SB accessions had a very close level of similarity. Meanwhile, the DA-Tr accession exhibited the most distinct character from the other accessions with the dominant color being purple covering stems, stem wings, leaf veins, leaf margins, petioles, and petiole wings.