Morphological and Structural Characters of Trichomes on Various Organs of Rosa roxburghii

Abstract

Rosa roxburghii Tratt (Rosaceae) of various organ surfaces are widely existing trichomes. Certain varieties have fruits that are thickly covered with macroscopic trichomes. R. roxburghii Tratt (RR) and R. roxburghii Tratt. f. esetosa Ku (RRE) are important commercial horticultural crops in China because of their nutritional and medicinal values. RRE is generally considered a smooth-fruit variant that arose from RR. Despite their economic importance, the morphological and anatomic features of organ trichomes have not been explored in detail for these two rose germplasms. In this research, we investigated the distribution, morphology, and structure of trichomes distributed on the stem, pedicel, fruit, sepal, and marginal lobule sepals (MLS) of RR as well as RRE. This was accomplished using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). There are various shapes of trichomes distributed on the surfaces of stems, pedicels, fruits, and sepals of the two germplasms. Binate prickles arose on the stem nodes in both germplasms, but acicular trichomes, papillary trichomes, and ribbon trichomes were present only on the surfaces of pedicels in RR. Likewise, flagelliform trichomes were present only on the surfaces of pedicels in RRE. Furthermore, a transection of stems shows that thorns in the two germplasms are composed of epidermis, meristematic layer, and parenchyma cells. The trichome epidermis and meristematic layer in stems of RR are composed of round cells, whereas RRE exhibits square cells in the same layers. Trichomes on the fruit of RR were macroscopic and of single flagelliform and acicular shape. RRE exhibited polymorphic trichomes of flagelliform, triangular, capitate glandular, and elliptic glandular shapes on the pericarp. On the surfaces of RR sepals, there are thick macroscopic acicular trichomes. In contrast, RRE sepals presented flagelliform trichomes and capitate glandular trichomes. It is interesting that no trichomes were found on the surfaces of the MLS in the two germplasms; however, stomata were densely packed on the MLS of RRE when compared with RR. For RR, the trichomes on both sepal and fruit are composed of an epidermis layer and parenchyma cells; however, the epidermis cells of sepal trichomes are polygon-shaped, in contrast to the round epidermis cells in fruit. These results suggest that the two rose germplasms are good candidates for understanding the trichome ontogeny in the genus and for further breeding of the smooth organ trait in this rose species.