Primary Studies On Cultivation Of Lepidium Meyenii

Maca, a rare medicine-and-food plant, has been eaten for thousands of years as a highnutritional crop in the mountainous area of Andean, Peru. It behaves a very promisingprospect in the international market of health-care production because it plays an unusualrole in the improvement of stamina, endurability, sexual quality and so on. Now it is greatlyurgent that Maca should be introduced because its annual total yield could not meet theinternational market demand. In order to make Maca be introduced to China, the basicproblems related to introduction and planting such as morphology classification, regionlayout, tissue culture and allelopathy were carried out. And the results were as follows: (1) The numerical Taxonomy of Maca and fifteen plants of Lepidium in China wasinvestigated by cluster analysis and the results showed that the method of numericaltaxonomy could be applied for Lepidium and its results were basically consistent with thatof morphology taxonomy and molecular marker such as Pi intron, ITS and cpDNA.Kinships between Maca and other plants in Lepidium have been carried out. The similaritycoefficient of Maca and L.sativum, L.cartilagineum equaled to 0.839 and 0.722,respectively and they could be used as reference varieties for introduction of Maca. (2) The relationships of climate between native region of Maca and exotic regions towhich Maca would be introduced were analyzed by means of grey relation grades(GRGs).The results showed that Dalian, Qingdao, Tianjing, Kunming, Zhengzhou and Xi'an, whoseGRGs were up to 0.75, have the closest relationship with native region and could be firstlyconsiderated as the ideal regions for introduction, Beijing, Shenyang etc. with GRGs from0.65 to 0.75 subsequently attracted our attentions and others, such as Lanzhou, Xi'an and soforth, were not the suitable regions. Based on the results of morphology taxonomy and themain distribution regions of Lepidium in China, these resuls that the ideal regions forintroduction mainly lay in the northeast and north of China by GRGs were basically IIconsistent with the main native distribution regions of fifteen plants of Lepidium in China.Especially the native distribution regions of L.sativum that had the nearest kinships withMaca by morphology taxonomy were totally layouted as the ideal regions for introduction.So the grey relation grades could be used for the layout of regions for introduction of Maca. (3) The micropropagation system of Maca was established by tissue culture. Theresults were as follows, MS basic medium supplemented with 6-BA (0.5mg·L-1) and NAA P P(0.5mg·L-1) was the optimum medium for callus induction and its inducement ratio was P P57.7%, and MS basic medium supplemented with 6-BA (4.0mg·L-1) and NAA (0.5mg·L-1) P P P Pwas confirmed to fit for shoot inducement and the multiplication coefficient was fromfifteen to twenty, however, MS basic medium with half of the quantity of mass elementsand NAA (0.5mg·L-1) was suitable for rooting and its percentage of rooting was 66.7%. The P Psurvival percentage of transplanting was about 30%. (4) Allelopathy between Maca and other plants has been investigated. The resultsshowed that foliage extracts of Maca could evidently block the action of seed germinationof referent plant and their functions had relations with the quantity of remnant of Maca.And these results provided the foundation for introduction of Maca and ecological safety.