The effects of resource availability and environmental conditions on genetic rankings for carbon isotope discrimination during growth in tomato and rice
Jonathan P. Comstock A F , Susan R. McCouch A , Bjorn C. Martin B , Charles G. Tauer C , Todd J. Vision D , Yunbi Xu A and Roman C. Pausch EA Department of Plant Breeding, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
B Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA.
C Department of Forestry, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA.
D Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Campus Box 3280 Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
E Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
F Corresponding author. Email: JPC8@cornell.edu
Functional Plant Biology 32(12) 1089-1105 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP05117
Submitted: 17 May 2005 Accepted: 29 July 2005 Published: 1 December 2005
Abstract
Carbon isotope discrimination (Δ) is frequently used as an index of leaf intercellular CO2 concentration (ci) and variation in photosynthetic water use efficiency. In this study, the stability of Δ was evaluated in greenhouse-grown tomato and rice with respect to variable growth conditions including temperature, nutrient availability, soil flooding (in rice), irradiance, and root constriction in small soil volumes. Δ exhibited several characteristics indicative of contrasting set-point behaviour among genotypes of both crops. These included generally small main environmental effects and lower observed levels of genotype-by-environment interaction across the diverse treatments than observed in associated measures of relative growth rate, photosynthetic rate, biomass allocation pattern, or specific leaf area. Growth irradiance stood out among environmental parameters tested as having consistently large main affects on Δ for all genotypes screened in both crops. We suggest that this may be related to contrasting mechanisms of stomatal aperture modulation associated with the different environmental variables. For temperature and nutrient availability, feedback processes directly linked to ci and / or metabolite pools associated with ci may have played the primary role in coordinating stomatal conductance and photosynthetic capacity. In contrast, light has a direct effect on stomatal aperture in addition to feedback mediated through ci.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Christine Fleet and Wendy Vonhof for major contributions in data collection and analysis, Brian Gollands for figure preparation, and Paul King for coordination and mentoring of high school and undergraduate interns. In particular, Rebecca Rudicell collected data for the Keeling plots relating δ13C of greenhouse air to atmospheric [CO2]; Shaan Ghandi and Leonora Ballantyne did repeated size measures for growth analysis and Anna Nowogrodski and Laura Vineyard assisted with gas-exchange measurements. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Plant Genome Research Project Grant DBI-0110069, Genomic Analysis of Plant Water Use Efficiency.
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