Supplementary Information - Understanding the relationship between water availability and biosilica accumulation in selected C₄ crops leaves: an experimental approach - D'Agostini et al., 2022
Creators: name: Francesca, D'Agostini
name: Vadez Vincent
name: Kholova Jana
name: Ruiz-Pérez Javier
name: Madella Marco
name: Lancelotti Carla
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: silicon
phytoliths
C4 crops
transpiration

description: Supplementary Information The current version provides the same files of the previous one, renamed and grouped. <strong>Understanding the relationship between water availability and biosilica accumulation in selected C₄ crops leaves: an experimental approach</strong> D'Agostini F., Vadez V., Kholova J., Ruiz-Pérez J., Madella M., Lancelotti C. Biosilica accumulation in plant tissues is related to the transpiration stream which in turn depends on water availability. Nevertheless, the debate on whether genetically and environmentally controlled mechanisms of biosilica deposition are directly connected to water availability is still open. We aim at clarifying the system which leads to the deposition of biosilica in Sorghum bicolor, Pennisetum glaucum, and Eleusine coracana, expanding our understanding of the physiological role of silicon in crops well adapted to arid environments, and simultaneously advancing the research in archaeological and paleoenvironmental studies. We cultivated ten traditional landraces for each crop in lysimeters, simulating irrigated and rain-fed scenarios in arid contexts. The percentage of biosilica accumulated in leaves indicates that both well-watered millet species deposited more biosilica than the water-stressed ones. By contrast, sorghum accumulated more biosilica in respect to the other two species and biosilica accumulation was independent of the water regime. The water treatment alone did not explain neither the variability of the assemblage nor the differences in the biosilica accumulation, hence we hypothesize that genetics influences the variability substantially. These results demonstrate that biosilica accumulation differs among and within C4 species and that water availability is not the only driver in this process. File <strong>S1</strong>: <em>Experiment dataset - </em>It includes the experimental cultivation layout, the climatic data recorded during the fieldwork, the plant physiological data (including flowering time scoring) and the database of the silicon extracted. File <strong>S2</strong>: <em>R script</em> - it includes all the scripts used for statistics and data visualisation. Figure <strong>S1</strong>: <em>Biomass boxplots</em> - Boxplots of biomass accumulation values of finger millet landraces (FM1, FM2, FM6, FM7), pearl millet landraces (PM5, PM7, PM9, PM2, PM1) and sorghum landraces (S5, S6, S8, S9, S2) by water treatments and grouped for country of origine. Horizontal bar = median, white diamond = mean, black dots = outliers. Figure <strong>S2</strong>: <em>Linera regressions</em> - Linear regression tested for each of the 4 landraces of finger millet (FM1, FM2, FM6, FM7); 5 landraces of pearl millet (PM2, PM7, PM1, PM5, PM8) and 5 landraces of sorghum (S5, S8, S2, S6, S9). Total water transpired (L) is used as independent variable, and % silica extracted from leaves as dependent variable. Gray bands represent 95% of confidence intervals.