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Comparison of seed morphology of two ginkgo cultivars

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Abstract

Ginkgo biloba L. is a precious relic tree species with important economic value. Seeds, as a vital reproductive organ of plants, can be used to distinguish cultivars of the species. We chose 400 seeds from two cultivars of ginkgo (“Fozhi” and “Maling”; 200 seeds for each cultivar) as the study material and used the Gielis equation to fit the projected shape of these seeds. The coefficients of variation (CV) in root mean squared errors (RMSE) obtained from the fitted data were used to compare the level of inter-cultivar variations in seed shape. We also used the covariance analysis to compare the allometric relationships between seed weights and projected areas of these two cultivars. The Gielis equation fitted well the seed shapes of two ginkgo cultivars. The lower CV in RMSE of cultivar “Fozhi” than “Maling” indicated a less symmetrical seed shape in the latter than the former. The bootstrap percentile method showed that the seed shape differences between the two cultivars were significant. However, there was no significant difference in the exponents between the seed weights and the projected areas of these two cultivars. Overall, the significant differences in shapes between the seeds of two ginkgo cultivars were well explained by the Gielis equation; this model can be further extended to compare morphological differences in other ginkgo cultivars, and even for plant seeds or animal eggs that have similar oval shapes.

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Acknowledgements

We are deeply thankful to Prof. Hsin-i Wu (Texas A & M University) for his valuable help for commenting on the earlier version of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Co-Innovation Centre for Sustainable Forestry in Southern China, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, 210037, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Fang Tian, Yujun Wang & Peijian Shi

  2. Everglades Research and Education Center, University of Florida, 3200 E. Palm Beach Road, Belle Glade, FL, 33430, USA

    Hardev S. Sandhu

  3. Department of Biosciences Engineering, University of Antwerp, 2020, Antwerp, Belgium

    Johan Gielis

Authors
  1. Fang Tian
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  2. Yujun Wang
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  3. Hardev S. Sandhu
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  4. Johan Gielis
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  5. Peijian Shi
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Contributions

PS and JG designed the experiment and analyzed the data; FT and YW carried out the experiment and contributed equally to this work; FT, YW and HSS wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peijian Shi.

Additional information

Project funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31400348), Postgraduate Research and Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (No. KYCX17_0836), and the PAPD of Jiangsu Province.

The online version is available at http://www.springerlink.com

Corresponding editor: Tao Xu.

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Tian, F., Wang, Y., Sandhu, H.S. et al. Comparison of seed morphology of two ginkgo cultivars. J. For. Res. 31, 751–758 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11676-018-0770-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11676-018-0770-y

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