Vegetable Plant Part Relationships. IV. An Interpretation of Growth Regulator Experiments with Root Crops

Abstract

A quantitative scheme to describe the growth of plant parts during the vegetative phase of development is extended to include the concept of hormone directed transport. The expected effect on shoot/storage root d. wt relationships of a single àxternal application of a growth regulating chemical is investigated using this approach. The theory predicts that the resulting change in the pattern of assimilate partitioning will modify the underlying relationship between shoot and storage root weights in a simple measurable fashion. The theory is inevitably oversimplified and speculative in parts but when a derived equation was fitted to data from an experiment in which gibberellic acid and daminozide were applied to carrots, close agreement was found between the predictions and experimental data.