Julian's Science Experiments
  • Famous Experiments and Inventions
  • The Scientific Method
  • Home Botany Experiments Botany Science Fair Projects Photosynthesis Fair Projects Warning!
       

    Factors Affecting Plant Growth
    K-12 Experiments & Background Information
    For Science Labs, Lesson Plans, Class Activities & Science Fair Projects
    For Primary, Elementary, Middle and High School Students & Teachers







    Plant Growth Experiments

    Plant Growth Background Information

    Introduction

    The genotype of a plant affects its growth. For example, selected varieties of wheat grow rapidly, maturing within 110 days, whereas others, in the same environmental conditions, grow more slowly and mature within 155 days.

    Growth is also determined by environmental factors, such as temperature, available water, available light, and available nutrients in the soil. Any change in the availability of these external conditions will be reflected in the plants growth.

    Biotic factors are also capable of affecting plant growth. Plants compete with other plants for space, water, light and nutrients. Plants can be so crowded that no single individual produces normal growth, causing etiolation and chlorosis. Optimal plant growth can be hampered by grazing animals, suboptimal soil composition, lack of mycorrhizal fungi, and attacks by insects or plant diseases, including those caused by bacteria, fungi, viruses, and nematodes.

    Simple plants like algae may have short life spans as individuals, but their populations are commonly seasonal. Other plants may be organized according to their seasonal growth pattern: annual plants live and reproduce within one growing season, biennial plants live for two growing seasons and usually reproduce in second year, and perennial plants live for many growing seasons and continue to reproduce once they are mature. These designations often depend on climate and other environmental factors; plants that are annual in alpine or temperate regions can be biennial or perennial in warmer climates. Among the vascular plants, perennials include both evergreens that keep their leaves the entire year, and deciduous plants which lose their leaves for some part of it. In temperate and boreal climates, they generally lose their leaves during the winter; many tropical plants lose their leaves during the dry season.

    The growth rate of plants is extremely variable. Some mosses grow less than 0.001 millimeters per hour (mm/h), while most trees grow 0.025-0.250 mm/h. Some climbing species, such as kudzu, which do not need to produce thick supportive tissue, may grow up to 12.5 mm/h.

    Plants protect themselves from frost and dehydration stress with antifreeze proteins, heat-shock proteins and sugars (sucrose is common). LEA (Late Embryogenesis Abundant) protein expression is induced by stresses and protects other proteins from aggregation as a result of desiccation and freezing.

    Factors Affecting Plant Growth

    Plant nutrition is the study of the chemical elements that are necessary for growth. In 1972, E. Epstein defined 2 criteria for an element to be essential for plant growth: (1) in its absence the plant is unable to complete a normal life cycle or (2) that the element is part of some essential plant constituent or metabolite, this is all in accordance with Liebig's law of the minimum. There are 17 essential plant nutrients. Carbon and oxygen are absorbed from the air, while other nutrients including water are obtained from the soil. Plants must obtain the following mineral nutrients from the growing media:

    • the three primary macronutrients: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).
    • the three secondary macronutrients such as calcium (Ca), sulphur (S), magnesium (Mg).
    • the macronutrient Silicon (Si)
    • and micronutrients or trace minerals: boron (B), chlorine (Cl), manganese (Mn), iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), molybdenum (Mo), nickel (Ni), selenium (Se), and sodium (Na).

    Plant hormones (also known as phytohormones) are chemicals that regulate plant growth, which, in the UK, are termed 'plant growth substances'. Plant hormones are signal molecules produced within the plant, and occur in extremely low concentrations. Hormones regulate cellular processes in targeted cells locally and when moved to other locations, in other locations of the plant. Hormones also determine the formation of flowers, stems, leaves, the shedding of leaves, and the development and ripening of fruit. Plants, unlike animals, lack glands that produce and secrete hormones, instead each cell is capable of producing hormones. Plant hormones shape the plant, affecting seed growth, time of flowering, the sex of flowers, senescence of leaves and fruits. They affect which tissues grow upward and which grow downward, leaf formation and stem growth, fruit development and ripening, plant longevity, and even plant death. Hormones are vital to plant growth and lacking them, plants would be mostly a mass of undifferentiated cells.

    Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) was first defined by Kloepper and Schroth to describe soil bacteria that colonize the roots of plants following inoculation onto seed and that enhance plant growth. The following are implicit in the colonization process: ability to survive inoculation onto seed, to multiply in the spermosphere (region surrounding the seed) in response to seed exudates, to attach to the root surface, and to colonize the developing root system. The ineffectiveness of PGPR in the field has often been attributed to their inability to colonize plant roots. A variety of bacterial traits and specific genes contribute to this process, but only a few have been identified. These include motility, chemotaxis to seed and root exudates, production of pili or fimbriae, production of specific cell surface components, ability to use specific components of root exudates, protein secretion, and quorum sensing. The generation of mutants altered in expression of these traits is aiding our understanding of the precise role each one plays in the colonization process. Progress in the identification of new, previously uncharacterized genes is being made using nonbiased screening strategies that rely on gene fusion technologies. These strategies employ reporter transposons and in vitro expression technology (IVET) to detect genes expressed during colonization.

    Topics of Interest

    Liebig's Law of the Minimum, often simply called Liebig's Law or the Law of the Minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1828) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor).

    This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth. Only by increasing the amount of the limiting nutrient (the one most scarce in relation to "need") was the growth of a plant or crop improved. This principle can be summed up in the aphorism, "The availability of the most abundant nutrient in the soil is as the availability of the least abundant nutrient in the soil."

    The simulated growth of plants is a significant task in of systems biology and mathematical biology, which seeks to reproduce plant morphology with computer software. The realistic modeling of plant growth is of high value to biology, but also for computer games.

    A challenge for plant simulations is to consistently integrate environmental factors, such as surrounding plants, obstructions, water and mineral availability, and lighting conditions. is to build virtual/environments with as many parameters as computationally feasible, thereby, not only simulating the growth of the plant, but also the environment it is growing within, and, in fact, whole ecosystems. Changes in resource availability influence plant growth, which in turn results in a change of resource availability. Powerful models and powerful hardware will be necessary to effectively simulate these recursive interactions of recursive structures.

    For more information:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant#Factors_affecting_growth
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_hormone
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_nutrition

    Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

    Useful Links
    Botany and Agriculture Science Fair Projects and Experiments
    General Science Fair Project Resources
    Botany Science Fair Projects Books

                  





    My Dog Kelly

    Follow Us On:
         

    Privacy Policy - Site Map - About Us - Letters to the Editor

    Comments and inquiries could be addressed to:
    webmaster@julianTrubin.com


    Last updated: June 2013
    Copyright © 2003-2013 Julian Rubin