Last week, I tested what Silver Queen maize could do. No experiment, just put some seeds in the germination box and took a look, day by day. The results were great. Of the 20 kernels I put in the box, 20 germinated. Of the 20 germinated seedlings, 18 of them were just about the same size, 8 cm or so, five days after planting, the other two seedlings were small. Even by day 5, the coleoptiles were intact, with the leaves yet to break through. Soldiers on parade could scarcely be more uniform. At the end of the run, out in the bright light, when I saw the uniform rows of seedlings, I gasped. I suppose it is like a cornfield, in miniature.

Practically speaking, this makes day 4 ideal for doing an experiment. The coleoptiles will be long enough to harvest and no danger of them being about to stop growing. I set up another batch of Silver Queen seed on Friday and plan to do an experiment with coleoptiles this Tuesday.

Scientifically speaking, this was a remarkable demonstration of hybrid vigor. Last week’s batch, the inbred line A619, germinated and grew unevenly, so much so as to make doing an experiment impractical. But even the commercial hybrid I got in the UK grew less uniformly than this Silver Queen. The UK material gave about 70% germination (when fresh) and had a range of seedling growth rates. That is, every batch I set up had both large and small seedlings, making it even a little difficult to chose seedlings of uniform length for the experiments. I thought back to the hybrid I used for my Ph. D. work and if memory serves (not too many aces these days but) I’d say it was intermediate, better than the UK stuff but not as synchronous as Sliver Queen.

I am now wondering whether the unspeakable variation (tho speak of it I have) in my UK experiments has a genetic explanation? I have been so fixated on environmental explanations as to have been oblivious the possibility that genes were getting in the way. If the seedlings of a genotype vary in how rapidly they grow (or in how fast they establish their get-up-and-grow program), why not a comparable variability in how their excised mesocotyls respond to auxin? I have no answer to this, except to try not only coleoptiles but also mesocotyls with the Silver Queen. It will be easy to find out. Coleoptiles first!

In full disclosure, this past week saw me do more science-wise than watch coleoptiles grow. I spent quite a few hours on the computer “crunching” data. I wonder about this verb, crunching? Outside of a few clicks the process is silent. And crunching implies some kind of breakage, but I was not factoring numbers. The processes involved are all about transformation. Number costuming? Number metabolizing? Better words, but rather long. My collaborator uploaded a large set of images of growing roots. My job is to convert (transform or metabolize) the images into numbers – key parameters that quantify various aspects of that growth. To this end, I set up directories, make accessory files, modify the images, and measure one or two features of the root for reference, all in aid of the next step. I run an algorithm in MATLAB that reads in the images, provided all of this infrastructure is built without a comma wrong, and generates key output files. Then, I move the relevant output into a spreadsheet and make plots.

What I click on is, I hope, less interesting than what I experiment on, so I don’t feel motivated to detail all this number metabolizing, but the above did occupy a quadrant of my time. In a future post, I will describe the experiments and what we are trying to learn. Perhaps when I have run out of coleoptiles.