Fig. 2.

Relationship between leaf silicon concentrations and leaf dry matter content. (A) Standardized major axis regression line and statistics of the bivariate relationship between leaf silicon (Si) concentrations and leaf dry matter content (LMDC) among 49 rice genotypes. (B) To avoid spurious correlations, we also examined the relationship between leaf [Si] and silica-free LDMC. Silica-free LDMC was calculated as follows: (leaf dry weight−silica weight)/(leaf fresh weight−silica weight). The weight of silica in the leaves used for LDMC was calculated using leaf [Si]. Si was converted into silica by multiplying by 2.14 and assuming a 10% mean water content and a 5% content of other elements (Blecker et al., 2006). Both relationships were very similar, with a slightly greater explanatory power for the relationship between leaf [Si] and corrected LDMC.