The root anatomy of 12 Amaranthus taxa (Amaranthaceae) was studied. The internal structures were evaluated as an anatomical character to clarify the taxonomic complexity in the genus. Transactions of young roots of the studied species showed no variations. | Annals of Agricultural Science 2015 60 1 53 60 H O S T E D BY Faculty of Agriculture Ain Shams University Annals of Agricultural Science locate aoas Root anatomy of some species of Amaranthus Amaranthaceae and formation of successive cambia . El-Ghamery a Ahmed M. Sadek a Ola H. Abd Elbar b a Botany and Microbiology Department Faculty of Science Al-Azhar University Cairo Egypt b Agriculture Botany Department Faculty of Agriculture Ain-Shams University Cairo Egypt Received 26 February 2015 accepted 15 March 2015 Available online 4 July 2015 KEYWORDS Abstract The root anatomy of 12 Amaranthus taxa Amaranthaceae was studied. The internal Amaranthus root anatomy structures were evaluated as an anatomical character to clarify the taxonomic complexity in the Secondary thickening genus. Transactions of young roots of the studied species showed no variations. While the old roots Anomalous cambium examination revealed differences in the products of the secondary thickening and their distribution Taxonomy also differences in the anomalous cambium products were detected. Twelve characters with 26 char- acter stats were used to generate anatomical key using the DELTA key-generating programs. ª 2015 Production and hosting by Elsevier . on behalf of Faculty of Agriculture Ain Shams University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license http licenses by-nc-nd . Introduction known to be a taxonomically difficult group Joshi and Rana 1991 and the taxonomy of this genus has been confused The genus Amaranthus consists about 60 70 species Costea by extremely wide range of phenotypic plasticity among and DeMason 2001 includes many widely dispersed econom- species and by the possible introgression involving weedy ically important species. The grain amaranths are ancient and crop species Hauptli and Jain 1978 1984 . Correct crops with increasing prospects as potential food and feed identification of Amaranthus weed species .
