Table 2.

Effect of darkening the exposed peduncle at the end of anthesis on grain dry mass (g ear^-1) during grain-filling.

Treatment	Developmental stage
	11	2	3	4	5
Non-darkened (control)	0	0.12 ± 0.01a2	0.61 ± 0.04a	1.14 ± 0.05a*3	1.38 ± 0.06a**
Exposed peduncle darkened	0	0.12 ± 0.01a	0.59 ± 0.03a	1.07 ± 0.04b	1.26 ± 0.06b

¹Stages 1-5 correspond to the end of anthesis, the milk-development stage, the soft dough-development stage, the hard dough-development and the ripening stage, respectively.

² Means followed by different letters within a column are significantly different by a Tukey test (P < 0.05).

³ * and ** indicate significance at the 0.05 and 0.01 probability levels, respectively.