Abstract
Gravity is a powerful element in shaping plant development, with gravitropism, the oriented growth response of plant organs to the direction of gravity, leading to each plant’s characteristic form both above and below ground. Despite being conceptually simple to follow, monitoring a plant’s directional growth responses can become complex as variation arises from both internal developmental cues as well as effects of the environment. In this protocol, we discuss approaches to gravitropism assays, focusing on automated analyses of root responses. For Arabidopsis, we recommend a simple 90° rotation using seedlings that are 5–8 days old. If images are taken at regular intervals and the environmental metadata is recorded during both seedling development and gravitropic assay, these data can be used to reveal quantitative kinetic patterns at distinct stages of the assay. The use of software that analyzes root system parameters and stores this data in the RSML format opens up the possibility for a host of root parameters to be extracted to characterize growth of the primary root and a range of lateral root phenotypes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Guyomarc’h S, Léran S, Auzon-Cape M et al (2012) Early development and gravitropic response of lateral roots in Arabidopsis thaliana. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 367:1509–1516. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0231
Kiss JZ, Miller KM, Ogden LA, Roth KK (2002) Phototropism and gravitropism in lateral roots of Arabidopsis. Plant Cell Physiol 43:35–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/pcp/pcf017
Digby J, Firn RD (1995) The gravitropic set-point angle (GSA): the identification of an important developmentally controlled variable governing plant architecture. Plant Cell Environ 18:1434–1440. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3040.1995.tb00205.x
Nakamura M, Nishimura T, Morita MT (2019) Bridging the gap between amyloplasts and directional auxin transport in plant gravitropism. Curr Opin Plant Biol 52:54–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbi.2019.07.005
Su S-H, Gibbs NM, Jancewicz AL, Masson PH (2017) Molecular mechanisms of root gravitropism. Curr Biol 27:R964–R972. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.07.015
Correll MJ, Kiss JZ (2002) Interactions between gravitropism and phototropism in plants. J Plant Growth Regul 21:89–101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s003440010056
Ingram PA, Malamy JE (2010) Root system architecture. Adv Bot Res 55:75–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-380868-4.00002-8
Band LR, Wells DM, Larrieu A et al (2012) Root gravitropism is regulated by a transient lateral auxin gradient controlled by a tipping-point mechanism. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 109:4668–4673. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201498109
Gehan MA, Fahlgren N, Abbasi A et al (2017) PlantCV v2: Image analysis software for high-throughput plant phenotyping. PeerJ 2017. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4088
French A, Ubeda-Tomás S, Holman TJ et al (2009) High-throughput quantification of root growth using a novel image-analysis tool. Plant Physiol 150:1784–1795. https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.109.140558
Delory BM, Li M, Topp CN, Lobet G (2018) archiDART v3.0: A new data analysis pipeline allowing the topological analysis of plant root systems. F1000Research 7:22. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.13541.1
Schindelin J, Arganda-Carreras I, Frise E et al (2012) FIJI: an open-source platform for biomedical image analysis. Nat Methods 9:676–682. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2019
Lobet G, Pagès L, Draye X (2011) A novel image-analysis toolbox enabling quantitative analysis of root system architecture. Plant Physiol 157:29–39. https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.111.179895
Pound MP, French AP, Atkinson JA et al (2013) RootNav: navigating images of complex root architectures. Plant Physiol 162:1802–1814. https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.113.221531
Lobet G, Pound MP, Diener J et al (2015) Root system markup language: toward a unified root architecture description language. Plant Physiol 167:617–627. https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.114.253625
Merchant N, Lyons E, Goff S et al (2016) The iPlant collaborative: cyberinfrastructure for enabling data to discovery for the life sciences. PLoS Biol 14:e1002342. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002342
Massa GD, Gilroy S (2003) Touch modulates gravity sensing to regulate the growth of primary roots of Arabidopsis thaliana. Plant J 33:435–445. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-313X.2003.01637.x
Yasrab R, Atkinson JA, Wells DM et al (2019) RootNav 2.0: deep learning for automatic navigation of complex plant root architectures. Gigascience 8:giz123. https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giz123
Acknowledgment
This work is supported by NASA 80NSSC19K0126, 80NSSC21K0577 and NSF MCB2016177.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Barker, R., Johns, S., Trane, R., Gilroy, S. (2022). Analysis of Plant Root Gravitropism . In: Duque, P., Szakonyi, D. (eds) Environmental Responses in Plants. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2494. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2297-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2297-1_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-0716-2296-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-0716-2297-1
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols