A.N. Rao

DUS Test Guidelines in Mokara Orchids

According to UPOV Convention 1961, DUS (Distinctiveness, Uniformity and Stability) testing is essential to provide and promote an unique way to protect plant varieties with the objective of developing new plant genotypes and for the usefulness of consumers. This provides rights for breeders and farmers to utilize or evolve new strains of plants, to exploit alien genotypes having broad gene pool, to encourage intensive breeding methods and to inhibit exploitations of unauthorized genotypes. In the present study, 8 genotypes of Mokara were evaluated for preparation of DUS test guidelines with a number of morphological characters. Among 61 common descriptors developed, plant width, number of flowers/inflorescence, flower length, flower width, dominant colour of dorsal sepal, dominant colour of lateral sepal, petal dominant colour, dominant colour of lip apical lobe and throat colour of lip were selected for grouping of genotypes.