This will be a quick note. I am serving on a grant panel at the end of the coming week and hence have plenty of proposals to … decompose.

This past week, I repeated the procedure of holding up seedlings by poking the roots into the agar. I described agar-shelf ins and outs previously. The experiment worked in several respects. First, I could poke roots into the agar and the seeds stayed up and stayed still during imaging, all as expected and needed. No surprises. Second, the plots of root growth rate vs time look reasonable and similar to what they did before.

As seen by comparing figure 1 to figure 2 in the previous post,  the roots this past week grew more variably. There were a few super-fast ones. Their top speed of 3.5 mm/h is a record for anything I have gotten so far with these experiments and match what I would expect in soil. At the start of the experiment, these fast ones were a few millimeters longer than the slow ones. That might be a coincidence, but is something to consider. Happily, no root grew out of the agar. I can try to choose roots of more uniform length. But the main thing is to do one more repetition. As they say, third time is a charm!