1. INTRODUCTION
The Artemisia L. is of the largest genera in the tribe Anthemideae Cass. of the family Asteraceae Dumort., comprises 550 species distributed in the Northern Hemisphere (Mungalov, 2004; Beer, 2005; Boyko, 2011; Vakulenko et al., 2020) with aromatic herbaceous plant, subshrubs, or shrubs (Al‑Ajmi et al., 2021). Taxa of the genusArtemisia are usually utilized in folk and modern medicine for curing illnesses like malaria, hepatitis, cancer, and infections induced by fungi, bacteria, and viruses (Willcox, 2009; Abad et al., 2012; Al‑Ajmi et al., 2021). The genus Artemisia has been separated into 5 sections (Absinthium, Artemisia, Dracunculus, Seriphidium , and Tridentatae ) (Torrell et al., 1999). There are 26Artemisia taxa distributed in different phytogeographic regions in Turkey (Güner et al., 2012), belonging to Artemisia ,Dracunculus and Seriphidium sections. This infrageneric classification of the genus does not represent as a normal grouping (Valles & McArther, 2000). The genus includes the taxonomical difficulties due to the infra-spesific diversity of the used diagnostic morphological characters in the classification. This triggers the search for new diagnostic characteristics.
The fruits or seeds have the typical morphological characters such as shape, color, dimension and surface ornamentation structures, and they can reflect valuable in the clarifying of taxonomic difficulties and in the establishment of systematic relationships (Barthlott, 1981; Karaismailoğlu & Erol, 2018). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is very significant for the carpological micromorphology. It permits to examine the ultrastructure of integuments in more data and to clarify extra fruit characters, such as the features of the carpopodium and the apical bowl, primary and secondary surface structures ultrastructure of the surface (Mukherjee & Nordenstam, 2010; Boyko, 2011; Vakulenko et al., 2020).
SEM with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (SEM-EDS) is an elemental microanalysis technique broadly practical across a wide range of the physical and biological sciences, technology, and forensic studies (Goldstein et al., 2003). In this technique, electron-excited characteristic X-ray peaks offer characterization and quantification for all elements of the periodic table (Dale & Ritchie 2013). SEM-EDS is able to quantitative analysis with correctness and precision equivalent to wavelength dispersive spectrometry (WDS) analysis (Ritchie et al., 2012). This application has not been used for systematic purposes, so far. A percentage comparison of the elements in the achene pericarp would be helpful in systematically determining the correlation.
Some morphological, anatomical, cytological and palynological studies on some taxa of the genus Artemisia have been made, so far( Pınar & Adıgüzel, 1998; Nourbakhsh et al., 2008; Kursat & Civelek, 2011; Kurşat et al., 2011a, 2011b; Tabur et al., 2012; Tabur et al., 2014; Kursat et al., 2014; Kurşat et al., 2015; Kurşat et al., 2018; Sancar et al., 2021). Also, morphological characters of the achenes have been taken into account for diagnosis of a small number ofArtemisia taxa in different countries (Boyko, 2013; Abdel-Hamid, 2020; Vakulenko et al., 2020; Al‑Ajmi et al., 2021). However, the significance of the achene in the genus has often been ignored in Turkey, where is one of the centers of diversity for the genus. The target of this study is to examine the macro and micro morphological characteristics of achenes of Turkish Artemisia taxa for the first time, and debate the systematic practice of these characters. Also, the taxa within the genus will be compared for the first time, with elemental analyzes in the achene pericarp.