钱家鸣:谁帮我翻译？谢谢

Our approach to this problem has been to develop an extensive phenotypic analysis process for capturing data describing growth and development during the entire life of the plant. Single-gene mutations or altered environmental conditions may affect any number of traits, resulting in morphological changes and/or altered timing of development. Morphological changes often can be identified readily and recorded outside the context of extensive temporal or growth stage information. In contrast, mutations that result in altered developmental progression without major morphological changes can be recorded only if a temporal component is included in the analysis. Such time-course analyses are inevitably resource intensive and must be restricted in scope to allow the analysis of many samples in parallel. We have addressed this issue by developing a method for phenotyping plants based on a series of defined growth stages. The growth stages serve both as developmental landmarks and as triggers for the collection of morphological data that are of interest at specific stages of development.

Developmental growth stages have been described at the organismal level for a variety of experimental models, including Drosophila melanogaster (Hartenstein, 1993) and Caenorhabditis elegans (Wilkins, 1993). However, with the exception of definitions describing the phases of specific organs or tissue types (Smyth et al., 1990), very little unification in the stages of Arabidopsis growth and development has been achieved. Growth stage definitions for other plants have been developed, and these are used routinely in the breeding industry. One such example is the BASF, Bayer, Ciba-Geigy, Hoechst (BBCH) scale, which was proposed to provide a generic nomenclature for the assignment of growth stages in crop plants and weeds (Lancashire et al., 1991). We have used the BBCH scale as a basis to define a series of growth stages for use in the phenotypic analysis of Arabidopsis.