Fig. 4

Growth responses of duckweed to varying doses of salt. An overview of experimental design is shown in (A), mirroring the box (operations) and line (items) scheme used in the Aquarium designer interface. Duckweed fronds were grown in deepwell petri dishes for 10 days in media supplemented with 0–300 mM sodium chloride over 10 days. Images were collected approximately every 2 days and analyzed to quantify the area of green fronds in the dish. The resulting growth curves are shown plotted on a log scale in panel (B). After the 10-day trial, the growth was normalized by dividing the final area by the initial area for each sodium chloride concentration. A Hill equation was fit to the data to create a dose–response curve as shown in (C). After 10 days, fronds were harvested and the individual fronds from a sample of 5 ramets from each dish were manually separated from one another. An image was taken of the manually separated fronds and used to calculate frond diameters for plants in each of the treatment groups (D), as well as average number of fronds per ramet for each treatment group (E). An ANOVA with post-hoc Tukey Test found significant differences between concentrations, allowing us to group the conditions into significance groups (A, B, and C; p = 0.05). A representative image from the scripted analysis of fronds used to generate figures A and E is shown in panel (F). The green circles indicate the ‘fronds’ as interpreted by the analysis algorithm