Biological Validation of the Free Software RhizoVision Explorer to Determine Root Parameters in Horticultural Crops

Abstract

Aims The objectives of this work were to compare the degree of fit between WinRhizo (WR) and RhizoVision Explorer (RVE), and validated the utility of RVE in biological assays. Methods Seedlings of lettuce (Lactuca sativa L. var. Grand rapid), broccoli (Brassica oleracea L. var. italica Plenck H. Belstar) and bell pepper (Capsicum annuum L. H. Floridor) were irrigated with different concentrations of sodium selenate and sodium selenite. Scanned images of the roots were obtained and analyzed with WR and RVE. Results Results showed that mean bias error (MBE) values for total root length and average diameter of roots indicate an overestimation of RVE with respect to WR, while the opposite is true for the number of root tips. In bell pepper, the highest values of the root mean square error (RSME) were observed with respect to the other two crops. Furthermore, there were significant differences (P < .0001) between the values measured by RVE and WR for the 3 crops. For most of the crops and parameters evaluated there was a high linear regression coefficient between the programs. Similarly, linear correlation coefficient was high in all three crops for most of the root diameter classes evaluated. The two programs allowed finding similar significant differences for the selenium treatments. Conclusions RVE allowed to contrast and analyze the biological effect of different types of treatments on the roots.

A Review on Plant Root Architecture and Methods for Measuring Root Growth Parameters

“…Key parameters of root growth which include simple morphological parameters such as: root length (mm) and area (mm 2) , root number or root diameter and composite parameters such as root length (SRL: mm g − 1) or those related to root activity could be evaluated using WinRHIZO™ -WR -(Regent Instruments Inc., Quebec, Canada, 2000). WinRHIZO™ -WR -is one of the best-known software programmes to measure morphological parameters in root images (Pang et al 2011;Yan et al, 2022).Root parameters such as number of root tips (RT), total root length (TRL) in mm, average diameter (AD) in mm, and root length (mm) in diameter class could be calculated with the two software programs namely software (WinRHIZO Pro 2013d, Regent Instruments, Quebec, Canada)(WR) and software RhizoVision Explorer (© Noble Research Institute, LLC)(RVE) ( Stoffel et al, 2022).…”