The effect of steepness of temporal resource gradients on spatial root allocation.

ABSTRACT: Plants are able to discriminately allocate greater biomass to organs that grow under higher resource levels. Recent evidence demonstrates that split-root plants also discriminately allocate more resources to roots that grow under dynamically improving nutrient levels, even when their other roots grow in richer patches. Here, we further tested whether, besides their responsiveness to the direction of resource gradients, plants are also sensitive to the steepness of environmental trajectories. Split-root Pisum sativum plants were grown so that one of their roots developed under constantly-high nutrient levels and the other root was subjected to dynamically improving nutrient levels of variable steepness. As expected, plants usually allocated a greater proportion of their biomass to roots tha

SUBMITTER: Shemesh H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3258065 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature