No 'Comice' scions flowered either on the seedlings or on QC control rootstocks in year 2. In year 3, the total number of inflorescences was counted and their positions recorded; this was repeated in year 4. At the beginning of year 5, the proportions of inflorescence production were estimated according to the size of the tree, relative to the tree with the highest number of inflorescences.
At 10 and 20 months, we measured the number of leaves (LVS), length of the longest leaf (LEN LF), width of the longest leaf (WD LF), plant height (HT), length of the longest stem (LEN ST), number of stems (ST), number of flowering stems (FL ST), proportion of flowering stems (PROP FL ST = FL ST/ST), number of inflorescences (INF) and floret number (FL; for 1 3 inflorescences).
Populations in abandoned grasslands had more inflorescences, a lower proportion of seedlings and a higher proportion of flowering ramets compared to populations in grasslands under high grazing intensity.
Plants were scored for whether or not they produced an inflorescence, the proportion of ramets that produced inflorescences, the number of flowering nodes produced per inflorescence, the number of flowers produced per node, whether or not each flowering plant set fruit, and the proportion of flowers per plant that set fruit, as described in [ 26].
In wild-type Arabidopsis inflorescences, the proportion of 24 to 21 nt small RNA abundances is typically about 3 1, in which most 24-mers are a diverse population of heterochromatic siRNAs and most 21-mers are highly abundant miRNAs.
Each of the traits above explained slightly higher proportions of variance in the adjusted number of inflorescences, but results were otherwise similar to those obtained without adjustment (Table 4).
We observed that flowers on the primary inflorescence were more affected than flowers on the secondary inflorescences and the proportion of abnormalities was higher in SD conditions (Table 3).
Although the increased number of growth points translated into a higher likelihood of flowering, this increase in the number of new growth points actually resulted in a lower proportion of growth points that produced an inflorescence [ 26].
This phenomenon may be explained by the co-occurrence of QTL on BCIF LG 8 where introgression of I. brevicaulis alleles results in a decrease in the number of growth points produced by weight and an increase in the proportion of growth points that produce an inflorescence.
The double mutants segregating in the progeny of rps10b-1 pid-14/+ plants had a more severe phenotype than pid-14 alone, as neither cauline leaves nor branches, nor flowers were produced on the primary inflorescence, and the proportion of empty rosette axils was increased.
