Varieties of the plant Ctenante oppenheimiana: A colorful enigma of evolution.

The plant Ctenante oppenheimiana presents an interesting contrast of colors in the abaxial epidermis. A striking feature is that the stomata are green and cover a purple pavement where the pavement cells have green cellular walls. These characteristics have been used in studies about ecophysiology and phenotypic plasticity. However, the existence of a second tricolor variety of the plant make these characteristics even more heterogeneous and introduce new paradigms of the physiological role underlying this morphology. In this work we show by optical microscopy images the striking differences between the varieties bicolor and tricolor of the plant Ctenante oppenheimiana