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.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bookstein FL (1996) Biometrics, biomathematics and the morphometric synthesis. Bull Math Biol 58:313–365
Chacón R (2006) Modeling natural shapes with a simple nonlinear algorithm. Int J Bifurc Chaos 16:2365–2368
Chen P, He FR, Qian BL, Wei J, Wang L (2004) Seed types and their relative characteristics in Ginkgo biloba of China. Sci Silvae Sin 40(3):66–70 (in Chinese)
Chen QX, Cheng P, He AH (2007) Classification on germplasm resources of Ginkgo biloba L. J Jiangsu For Sci Technol 34(4):44–47 (in Chinese)
Cheng YP, Zhang ST (2008) Review of exploitation and utilization of ginkgo leaves. Mod Agric Sci Technol (23):95–96 (in Chinese)
Douglas AW, Stevenson DW, Little DP (2007) Ovule development in Ginkgo biloba L., with emphasis on the collar and nucellus. Int J Plant Sci 168:1207–1236
Dumais J, Harrison LG (2000) Whorl morphogenesis in the dasycladalean algae: the pattern formation viewpoint. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B 355:281–305
Faisal TR, Abad EMK, Hristozov N, Pasini D (2010) The impact of tissue morphology, cross-section and turgor pressure on the mechanical properties of the leaf petiole in plants. J Bionic Eng 7:11–23
Gielis J (2003) A general geometric transformation that unifies a wide range of natural and abstract shapes. Am J Bot 90:333–338
Gielis J (2017) The geometrical beauty of plants. Atlantis Press, Paris
He FR (1989) Cultivation of Ginkgo biloba L. trees. Phoenix Science Press, Nanjing (in Chinese)
Hu BY, Mao LL, Wang J, Xu AH (2014) Qualitative and quantitative analysis of Ginkgo biloba exocarp extracts. J Chin Med Mater 37(8):1400–1403 (in Chinese)
Jahromi MK, Rafiee S, Jafari A, Bousejin MRG, Mirasheh R, Mohtasebi SS (2008) Some physical properties of date fruit (cv. Dairi). Int Agrophys 22:221–224
Jensen RJ (1990) Detecting shape variation in oak leaf morphology: a comparison of rotational-fit methods. Am J Bot 77:1279–1293
Kincaid DT, Schneider RB (1983) Quantification of leaf shape with a microcomputer and Fourier transform. Can J Bot 61(9):2333–2342
Kuhl FP, Giardina CR (1982) Elliptic Fourier features of a closed contour. Comput Vis Graph Image Process 18(3):236–258
Leicht-Young SA, Pavlovic NB, Grundel R, Frohnapple KJ (2007) Distinguishing native (Celastrus scandens L.) and invasive (C. orbiculatus Thunb.) bittersweet species using morphological characteristics. J Torrey Bot Soc 134(4):441–450
Li GP, Zhang CQ, Cao FL (2013) An efficient approach to identify Ginkgo biloba cultivars by using random amplified polymorphic DNA markers with a manual cultivar identification diagram strategy. Genet Mol Res 12(1):175–182
Lin SY, Zhang L, Reddy GVP, Hui C, Gielis J, Ding YL, Shi PJ (2016) A geometrical model for testing bilateral symmetry of bamboo leaf with a simplified Gielis equation. Ecol Evol 6(19):6798–6806
Mahadevan S, Park Y, Park Y (2008) Modulation of cholesterol metabolism by Ginkgo biloba L. nuts and their extract. Food Res Int 41(1):89–95
Makarieva AM, Gorshkov VG, Li BL (2004) Ontogenetic growth: models and theory. Ecol Model 176(1):15–26
McLellan T (1993) The roles of heterochrony and heteroblasty in the diversification of leaf shapes in Begonia dreigei (Begoniaceae). Am J Bot 80(7):796–804
Meinhardt H (1998) The algorithmic beauty of sea shells, 2nd edn. Springer, Berlin
Mirzaee E, Rafiee S, Keyhani AR, Djom-eh ZE, Kheiralipour K (2008) Mass modeling of two varieties of apricot (Prunus armenaica L.) with some physical characteristics. Plant Omics 1(1):37–43
Nakanishi K (2005) Terpene trilactones from Ginkgo biloba: from ancient times to the 21st century. Bioorgan Med Chem 13(17):4987–5000
R Development Core Team (2015) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, 2011. http://www.R-project.org. Accessed 09 Mar 2015
Rohlf FJ (1996) Morphometric spaces, shape components and the effects of linear transformations. In: Marcus LF et al (eds) Advances in morphometrics. Plenum, New York, pp 117–129
Sandhu HS, Shi PJ, Kuang XJ, Xue FS, Ge F (2011) Applications of the bootstrap to insect physiology. Fla Entomol 94(4):1036–1041
Shi PJ, Huang JG, Hui C, Grissino-Mayer HD, Tardif JC, Zhai LH, Wang FS, Li BL (2015a) Capturing spiral radial growth of conifers using the superellipse to model tree-ring geometric shape. Front Plant Sci 6:856
Shi PJ, Xu Q, Sandhu HS, Gielis J, Ding YL, Li HR, Dong XB (2015b) Comparison of dwarf bamboos (Indocalamus sp.) leaf parameters to determine relationship between spatial density of plants and total leaf area per plant. Ecol Evol 5(20):4578–4589
Silva PF, Freire RCS, Serres AJR, Silva PHDF, Silva JC (2016) Wearable textile bioinspired antenna for 2G, 3G, and 4G systems. Microw Opt Technol Lett 58(12):2818–2823
Šmarda P, Veselý P, Šmerda J, Bureš P, Knápek O, Chytrá M (2016) Polyploidy in a ‘living fossil’ Ginkgo biloba. New Phytol 212(1):11–14
Thompson DW (1917) On growth and form. Cambridge University Press, London
Tredici PD (1991) Ginkgos and people—a thousand years of interaction. Arnoldia 51(2):3–15
van Oystaeyen F, Gielis J, Ceulemans R (1996) Mathematical aspects of real plant modeling. Scr Bot Belg 13:7–273
Wang XX, Zhou Q, Tao YY, Xu M, Yu WW, Xu LA (2017) The fingerprints construction and genetic diversity analysis of 48 fruit used ginkgo cultivars based on SSR markers. Mol Plant Breed 15:1963–1970
Wei Q, Jiao C, Guo L, Ding YL, Cao JJ, Feng JY, Dong XB, Mao LY, Sun HH, Fen Y, Yang GY, Shi PJ, Ren GD, Fei ZJ (2017) Exploring key cellular processes and candidate genes regulating the primary thickening growth of moso underground shoots. New Phytol 214:81–96
Xu XH, Yang LY, Sun BN, Wang YD, Chen P (2017) A new early cretaceous ginkgo, ovulate organ with associated leaves from Inner Mongolia, China and its evolutionary significance. Rev Palaeobot Palynol 244:163–181
Zhang BB, Diao TT, Dai MZ, Lyu GY, Chen SH (2016) Beauty pharmacology of activating blood circulation herbs and its application in modern cosmetics as plant extracts. Chin J Mod Appl Pharm 33(9):1221–1226 (in Chinese)
Zhang J, Zhao YL, Jin H, Zhang JY, Wang YZ (2017) Morphological variability and allometric relationships of the herb Panax notoginseng in Yunnan, China. Acta Ecol Sin 37(2):65–69
Zhao YP, Yan XL, Muir G, Dai QY, Koch MA, Fu CX (2016) Incongruent range dynamics between co-occurring Asian temperate tree species facilitated by life history traits. Ecol Evol 6:2346–2358
Zhou ZY (1994) Heterochronic origin of Ginkgo biloba-type ovule organs. Acta Palaeontol Sin 33(2):131–139 (in Chinese)
Zhou ZY (2003) Mesozoic ginkgoaleans: phylogeny, classification and evolutionary trends. Acta Bot Yunnan 25(4):377–396 (in Chinese)
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.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
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
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.
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
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
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11676-018-0770-y