The taxonomic importance of pollen morphologyin family Malvaceae had long been acknowledged as it pro-vides the basis for palynological and phylogenetic analysis.In present study, pollen morphological characteristics of var-ious Hibiscus syriacus cultivars were examined. The objec-tive of this study was to provide comprehensive evidence onpollen morphology and to determine pollen morphologicaldiversity in cultivars of H. syriacus that would be useful forplant taxonomy and classification. To get a clear insights ofthe pollen morphology, scanning electron microscopy (SEM)was carried out. It has been recorded that the pollen diam-eter of 16 cultivars of H. syriacus ranges from 108.81 to172.15 •Ïm. The maximum pollen size was reported fromthe cultivar ‘Chongdansim’ followed by the cultivar ‘Paedal’.The maximum spine exine length was reported from‘Jabae’ (25.29µm) followed by ‘Collie mullens’ (23.25µm),whereas the minimum value was recorded from ‘Paedal’(8.16µm). It is apparent from this study that pollen morphol-ogy of various H. syriacus cultivars was fairly uniform, andin almost all studied cultivars the pollen shape was spheroi-dal. The spines were present in all studied cultivars and var-ied considerably among the cultivars. The pollen spinefeatures presented notable variations which were of greatsignificance at both specific and generic levels, and hasalso been helpful in understanding the process of spine evo-lution within H. syriacus. The maximum distance betweenspines was observed from cultivar ‘Gyewolhyang’ that haddistance of 45.03µm. The morphological characteristics ofpollen studied in this study could be useful in performing amore efficient Hibiscus hybridization and breeding in future.

Introduction
 Material and Methods
  Plant materials
  Pollen morphological analysis
  Observation using a scanning electron microscope(SEM)
 Results and Discussion
 Acknowledgements
 References

• Sung Hwan Bae(Department of Horticulture, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Korea)
• Adnan Younis(Department of Horticulture, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Korea, Institute of Horticultural Sciences, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad 38040, Pakistan)
• Yoon-Jung Hwang(Department of Life Science, Sahmyook University, Seoul 139-742, Korea)
• Ki-Byung Lim(Department of Horticulture, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Korea) Corresponding author