I am working with Festuca rubra and Agrostis capilaris growing in contaminated soils, but the seeds have very low germination rate. Currently I’m comparing germination and growth of this seeds vs healthy seeds. However it would be interesting to compare seeds vs clonal reproduction of the same genotype, but I haven’t found any paper about it. Some advices or ideas?
I cannot answer your question specifically, but if you run a seed germination experiment try not to use a single metric, but rather measure the 3 parameters that characterize seed germination. This provides a complete picture of the differences, if any, between these two seed sources.
The 3 parameters are — percentage, rate, and uniformity. Germination percentage is the % of seeds that germinate. Germination rate is the “speed or velocity” of germination and is defined as the time it takes for a defined percentage of seed to germinate. Germination uniformity is a measure of the time it takes for all of the seeds to germinate.
The analysis would be to construct germination curves as these contain all the information from the 3 parameters. Use survival analysis to analyze. Kaplan and Meier method works well. Survival analysis is used in statistics to measure the time over which something happens.
This type of experiment is very easy to run and the analysis straightforward (many statistic's packages include survival analysis).
Biomass, cover, stress markers, chlorophyll production, etc. The thing is that, because a plant from a seed is developing from the very begging, while a vegetative reproducted plant has already developed for a while, the question is, at which point should this analysis be done? How to ensure that the comparison is fair? Do someb knows research about it?
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