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Functional Plant Biology Functional Plant Biology Society
Plant function and evolutionary biology
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Diel leaf growth of rapeseed at critically low temperature under winter field conditions

S. Nagelmüller A B C , S. Yates A and A. Walter A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Universitätstrasse 2, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.

B Institute of Botany, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Schönbeinstrasse 6, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.

C Corresponding author. Email: sebastian.nagelmueller@usys.ethz.ch

Functional Plant Biology 45(11) 1110-1118 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP17337
Submitted: 28 November 2017  Accepted: 23 April 2018   Published: 17 May 2018

Abstract

Growth and development of winter crops is strongly limited by low temperature during winter. Monitoring the temporal dynamics and thermal limits of leaf growth in that period can give important insights into the growth physiology at low temperature, crop management and future breeding traits for winter crops. In this study, we focussed on winter rapeseed as a model, dicotyledonous winter crop to study leaf growth under natural winter field conditions. Leaf growth was measured using a high-resolution marker based image sequence analysis method and the results were evaluated in the context of environmental conditions. Leaves stopped growing at a base temperature of 0°C. Above ~4°C, leaves grew with a diel (24 h) growth rhythm, which is typically known for dicots at thermally non-limiting growth conditions. Relative leaf growth rates at temperatures above this 4°C threshold were higher at night and showed a pronounced depression during the day, which we could describe by a model based on the environmental factors vapour pressure deficit (VPD), temperature and light with VPD exerting the strongest negative effect on leaf growth. We conclude that leaf growth of the selected model species at low temperatures shows a transition between pronounced environmental regulation and a superposition of environmental and internal, possibly circadian-clock-dependent regulation.

Additional keywords: dicotyledon, growth rhythm, image sequence analysis, low-temperature stress, marker tracking, modeling, modelling, plant growth, vapor pressure deficit, vapour pressure deficit.


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