I wish to follow the development of seedlings visually. Is there any protocol, not requiring high tech equipments, that I can follow for this purpose? Thank you
Provided a commonal condition, like plants growing nearby, a caliper or a ruler and some assumption about the end of cell division in leaf blades plastochron index can be useful to quantitate differences in nutrition, genotype and several other cases. Usually reference length for cell expansion start can be assumed in tge range of 10mm. http://www.amjbot.org/content/101/11/1821.full
Timelapse/trap cameras usually used in wildlife monitoring can remotely photograph plants at daily or hourly intervals. You then just place a scale next to the plant e.g. ruler that can be employed on the photograph to measure growth. There is also software to do measurements on photographs.
In addition to the above, If you do not have temperature control, I suggest you record some sort of heat unit measure, such as heat unit hours, or heat unit days. Temperatures must be taken very close to the seedling because micro climate varies drastically over very short distances. Especially after a certain seedling age, some sort of integrative light unit record might also be important (thousand candle power days, etc. maybe using a photographer's meter). Oh yes, the lighting might cause heating at the seedling level.
If the seedlings are being grown in the lab the following may work. Something I've done is to grow the seedlings on agar or Phytagel vertically, then photograph them periodically and use a simple free program like ImageJ to digitally measure the length of the root. The digital measuring is quite labor intensive, but it's more reliable than a simple ruler measure as you can account for curves and such. We used a growth chamber to control everything bar the control variables.
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Ecology