Abstract
Tropisms are among the most important growth responses for plant adaptation to the surrounding environment. One of the most common tropisms is root gravitropism. Root gravitropism enables the plant to anchor securely to the soil enabling the absorption of water and nutrients. Most of the knowledge related to the plant gravitropism has been acquired from the flowering plants, due to limited research in non-seed plants. Limited research on non-seed plants is due in large part to the lack of standard research methods. Here, we describe the experimental methods to evaluate gravitropism in representative non-seed plant species, including the non-vascular plant moss Physcomitrium patens, the early diverging extant vascular plant lycophyte Selaginella moellendorffii and fern Ceratopteris richardii. In addition, we introduce the methods used for statistical analysis of the root gravitropism in non-seed plant species.
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Acknowledgments
The Ceratopteris richardii spores were obtained from the lab of Jo Ann Banks at Purdue University. This work was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (ERC grant agreement number 742985), Austrian Science Fund (FWF, grant number I 3630-B25), IST Fellow program and DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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Zhang, Y., Li, L., Friml, J. (2022). Evaluation of Gravitropism in Non-seed Plants. In: Blancaflor, E.B. (eds) Plant Gravitropism. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2368. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1677-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1677-2_2
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