Needle Terpenes as Chemotaxonomic Markers in Pinus: Subsections Pinus and Pinaster

Chemical compositions of needle essential oils of 27 taxa from the section Pinus, including 20 and 7 taxa of the subsections Pinus and Pinaster, respectively, were compared in order to determine chemotaxonomic significance of terpenes at infrageneric level. According to analysis of variance, six out of 31 studied terpene characters were characterized by a high level of significance, indicating statistically significant difference between the examined subsections. Agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis has shown separation of eight groups, where representatives of subsect. Pinaster were distributed within the first seven groups on the dendrogram together with P. nigra subsp. laricio and P. merkusii from the subsect. Pinus. On the other hand, the eighth group included the majority of the members of subsect. Pinus. Our findings, based on terpene characters, complement those obtained from morphological, biochemical, and molecular parameters studied over the past two decades. In addition, results presented in this article confirmed that terpenes are good markers at infrageneric level.