Elsevier

Aquatic Botany

Volume 25, 1986, Pages 63-72
Aquatic Botany

Sulfated flavonoids and leaf morphology in the Halophila ovalis—H. minor complex (Hydrocharitaceae) of the Indo-Pacific Ocean

https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3770(86)90040-9Get rights and content

Abstract

Populations of the Halophila ovalis (R.Br) Hook. f—H. minor (Zoll.) den Hartog complex differ in the occurrence of sulfated flavonoids. In the Western Pacific, plants with larger leaves and/or more pairs of cross veins in the blades contain sulfated flavonoids, but those with smaller leaves and/or fewer cross veins lack these compounds. In the Indian Ocean, sulfated flavonoids are produced by smaller-leaved populations of Thailand, Tanzania and Madagascar, but are absent from smaller-leaved populations of India and South Africa. Among the larger-leaved populations of the Indian Ocean, those of India, Sudan and Saudi Arabia contain the sulfated flavonoids, but those of Thailand do not contain these compounds. Among the populations that contain sulfated flavonoids, most contained four compounds, but the small-leaved plants of Tanzania and Madagascar differed and produced only one sulfated flavonoid. The H. ovalis—H. minor complex remains one of the most complicated of the groups of seagrasses because of the wide range of morphological and chemical variation among local populations.

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    The deacylation reaction of compounds 3 and 4 occurring during the work-up suggested that malonylated flavone glycosides were most likely more abundant in the plant than chemical analysis indicates and, consequently, the corresponding non-esterified derivatives 5 and 7 should be considered as artefacts. With the exception of a recent investigation on H. johnsonii resulting in the chemical characterization of all main components of the flavone profile of this seagrass (Meng et al., 2008), previous studies on different Halophila species including H. stipulacea only reported qualitative analysis of flavone profiles and indicated the presence of unidentified flavones and flavone sulphates (McMillan et al., 1980; McMillan, 1986). In particular, these studies revealed a high variability in the flavone composition for the different Halophila species analyzed with regard to the complexity of the flavone mixture and to the presence of sulphate derivatives thus preventing reliable interspecific taxonomic relationships in Halophila seagrasses based on qualitative evaluation of flavone profiles.

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