Mašková Tereza, Klimeš Adam
Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czechia.
Department of Functional Ecology, Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Třeboň, Czechia.
Front Plant Sci. 2020 Jan 17;10:1693. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2019.01693. eCollection 2019.
Various types of flat rhizoboxes aid in root visualization and tracking in experiments where the focus is upon root system growth and development. While size of the pot is known to affect experiments, nothing is known about the impact of rhizoboxes-not only their volume, but also their shape might affect root and shoot growth. Therefore, we investigated how rhizoboxes change plant biomass and root:shoot biomass partitioning. We compared biomass and root:shoot ratio of plants growing in the pots with different geometry-usual three-dimensional, cuboid plant pots and flat two-dimensional rhizoboxes about the same volume. We used two different nutritional treatments (deionized water and additional nutrients) for investigating whether the nutrient availability in the substrate changed the impact of rhizoboxes on plant growth. We used 15 species for the generalizability of our results across the phylogenetic tree. Proportional investment of plants into roots was similar in usual pots and in rhizoboxes. This pattern was stable across nutrition treatments and across species. Further, we found no differences in total biomass of plants between pot type within nutrient treatments. With added nutrients, the plants had a higher biomass and lower root:shoot ratio compared to treatments without nutrient addition. Thus, species can be safely compared when grown in the rhizoboxes; rhizoboxes did not affect root system growth comparisons among species and nutrient levels. Also, they did not affect plant growth in terms of total biomass.
在以根系生长和发育为重点的实验中，各种类型的扁平根箱有助于根系可视化和追踪。虽然已知花盆大小会影响实验，但关于根箱的影响却一无所知——不仅是其体积，其形状也可能影响根和地上部分的生长。因此，我们研究了根箱如何改变植物生物量以及根与地上部分生物量的分配。我们比较了在不同几何形状的花盆中生长的植物的生物量和根冠比，这些花盆包括常见的三维长方体花盆和体积大致相同的扁平二维根箱。我们使用两种不同的营养处理（去离子水和额外添加的养分）来研究基质中的养分有效性是否会改变根箱对植物生长的影响。我们使用了15个物种，以确保我们的结果在整个系统发育树上具有普遍性。植物在普通花盆和根箱中对根系的比例投入相似。这种模式在不同营养处理和不同物种间都很稳定。此外，我们发现在养分处理中，不同花盆类型的植物总生物量没有差异。与未添加养分的处理相比，添加养分后，植物生物量更高，根冠比更低。因此，当植物在根箱中生长时，可以安全地对物种进行比较；根箱不会影响不同物种和养分水平之间根系生长的比较。而且，就总生物量而言，根箱也不会影响植物生长。
