Fig. 6.

Density plots and box plots illustrating flag leaf epidermal cell length in the near‐isogenic line (NIL) pair for flag leaf morphology QTL QFll.niab‐5A.1 (FLL5A). The contrasting alleles captured in the NIL pair originate from the founders Alchemy (FLL5A+; long flag leaf allele) and Claire (FLL5A−; short flag leaf allele). For boxplots, the vertical lines denote the median, boxes indicate the lower (25%) and upper (75%) quartiles, whiskers indicate the ranges of the minimum and maximum values, and dots predicted outliers. Cell length data shown are: (a) from field trial NIAB 2021, for FLL5A+ measured from flag leaves of mean length of the FLL5A+ plots, for FLL5A− plants measured from flag leaves of mean length within the FLL5A− plots. To determine whether difference in epidermal cell length was independent of flag leaf length, from the GH 2021 trial flag leaves of three different mean lengths were sampled for FLL5A+ and FLL5A− plants: (b) 24.7 cm, (c) 29.6 cm, (d) 32.5 cm, while flag leaves of equal mean length were sampled from FLL5A+ and FLL5A− plots in field trial NIAB 2022. (e) Field trial NIAB 2022, with leaves of equal length selected for each FLL5A allele − the mean flag leaf length of the samples studied are indicated. Cell length in all five panels were significantly different (P < 0.01) according to one‐way analysis of variance.