Phenotypic Analysis of Arabidopsis Mutants: Quantitative Analysis of Root Growth

INTRODUCTION

The growth of plant roots is very easy to measure and is particularly straightforward in Arabidopsis thaliana, because the increase in organ size is essentially restricted to one dimension. The precise measurement of root apical growth can be used to accurately determine growth activity (the rate of growth at a given time) during development in mutants, transgenic backgrounds, or in response to experimental treatments. Root growth is measured in a number of ways, the simplest of which is to grow the seedlings in a Petri dish and record the position of the advancing root tip at appropriate time points. The increase in root length is measured with a ruler and the data are entered into Microsoft Excel for analysis. When dealing with large numbers of seedlings, however, this procedure can be tedious, as well as inaccurate. An alternative approach, described in this protocol, uses “snapshots” of the growing plants, which are taken using gel-documentation equipment (i.e., a video camera with a frame-grabber unit, now commonly used to capture images from ethidium-bromide-stained electrophoresis gels). The images are analyzed using publicly available software (NIH-Image), which allows the user simply to cut and paste data into Microsoft Excel.