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First published online June 10, 2009; doi:10.3732/ajb.0800303
American Journal of Botany 96: 1313-1318 (2009)
© 2009 Botanical Society of America, Inc.
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Physiology and Biochemistry

A new method to measure leaf age: Leaf measuring-interval index1

Chyi-Chuann Chen2, Hung Chen3 and Yung-reui Chen2,4

2 Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan 3 Department of Mathematics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

ABSTRACT

We propose a new method, the leaf measuring-interval index (LMI), to estimate leaf age in morphological and physiological studies of leaves. When the plastochron, the interval between the initiation of successive leaves, is constant, the well-known leaf plastochron index (LPI) provides a robust measure of leaf age. When the duration of the plastochron is not uniform, however, we show that the LPI can (in simulations) and does (with actual data) turn variation in duration of the plastochron into variance about the regression estimates of leaf growth curves. The method we present in this paper, the LMI, is plastochron independent. This new method is particularly suited, therefore, for studies of plants growing in natural environments rather than in controlled growth facilities where the assumptions of the LPI method can be met.

Key Words: leaf growth curve • leaf measuring-interval index (LMI) • leaf plastochron index (LPI)

Received for publication 5 September 2008. Accepted for publication 2 February 2009.

FOOTNOTES

1 This work was done in partial fulfillment of the junior author’s PhD dissertation. The authors extend their sincere thanks to Dr. H. Sze at University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland for reading. Special thanks to Dr. M. Christianson at University of California, Berkeley, California for criticizing and editing the final version of the manuscript.

4 Author for correspondence (e-mail: yrc{at}ntu.edu.tw)


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