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AOBPreview originally published online on January 17, 2008
Annals of Botany 2008 101(4):603-611; doi:10.1093/aob/mcm319
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Analysis of Reciprocal-transfer Experiments to Estimate the Length of Phases having Different Responses to Temperature

Xinyou Yin*

Crop and Weed Ecology Group, Department of Plant Sciences, Wageningen University, P. O. Box 430, 6700 AK Wageningen, The Netherlands

* For Correspondence. E-mail xinyou.yin{at}wur.nl

Received: 4 October 2007    Returned for revision: 6 November 2007    Accepted: 29 November 2007    Published electronically: 17 January 2008

Background and Aims: The responsiveness of plant ontogeny to temperature may change with plant age. These changes may best be identified by experiments in which individual plants are transferred in a time series from low temperature (LT) to high temperature (HT), and vice versa. Any change in the value of the slope for a plot of the duration taken to complete a developmental phase against time of transfer (either LT to HT or HT to LT) will indicate a change in the temperature responsiveness of development, and the time at which this change occurs. The analysis of this type of reciprocal-transfer experiment is usually performed by regression for each of the visually identified linear sub-phases, separately for the data for LT-to-HT and for HT-to-LT transfers. Here, a mathematical approach is presented using a single curve-fitting procedure.

Methods: Both LT-to-HT and HT-to-LT transfers are combined in a single curve-fitting procedure. This new, combined approach is illustrated using a published data set for three rice (Oryza sativa) cultivars, where the pre-flowering duration is divided into three sub-phases, and temperature responsiveness is generally stronger during the second than the first and third sub-phases.

Results and Conclusions: This new model approach provides an objective method, relative to the separate analyses, for assigning data points to a particular sub-phase. Plausible parameter values can be obtained from capturing the whole data of both sets of transfers, which otherwise could not be obtained from the separate-analysis method. Furthermore, the length of sub-phases identified from the LT-to-HT transfers is consistent, in terms of its response to temperature, with that identified from the HT-to-LT transfers. Re-analysis of the published rice data using the new approach reveals that in addition to temperature sensitivity, the optimum temperature of pre-flowering development may vary with plant age. The new approach gives rise to a generalized model for the analysis of reciprocal transfer experiments to quantify age-dependent changes of response of plants (and potentially insects) to any environmental variables that have a significant impact on their development.

Key words: Flowering, phenology, rice, temperature, thermal response, reciprocal transfer experiment


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