Table 1.
Various La and pH treatments in the experimental design.
Table 2.
Formulas for the calculation of indicators of seed germination.
Fig 1.
Correlations among PhytLa content, phytolith content and the PhytLa content in seeds.
a PhytLa content vs. phytolith content; b phytolith content vs. the PhytLa content in seeds; c PhytLa content vs. the PhytLa content in seeds. n = 48.
Fig 2.
The pie chart of the quantitative proportion of different phytolith morphologies.
The total number of phytolith morphotypes is 7,488.
Fig 3.
Effects of La (at a LaCl3 concentration of 0, 20, 100 or 300 mg/L) and acid rain (at a pH of 3.5, 4.5 or 5.5) on dumbbell (a) and tube (b) in germinated rice seeds.
Error bars are standard deviations (n = 4); different letters indicate significant differences between different treatments at P = 0.05 based on the least significant difference (LSD) test.
Fig 4.
Effects of La (at a LaCl3 concentration of 0, 20, 100 or 300 mg/L) and acid rain (at pH value of 3.5, 4.5 or 5.5) on phytolith content (a), PhytLa content (b), the PhytLa content in seeds (c) and the PhytLa content/phytolith content ratio (d).
Error bars are standard deviations (n = 4); different letters indicate significant differences between different treatments at P = 0.05 based on the least significant difference (LSD) test.
Fig 5.
Effects of different pH levels on phytolith morphology (here, the LaCl3 concentration was 0 mg/L).
The pH values from top to bottom are 5.5, 4.5 and 3.5, and the phytolith morphotypes from left to right are dumbbells, tubes, crenates, elongate smooths and elongate echinates.
Table 3.
Correlation analysis of the vigour index of germinated rice seeds.
Table 4.
Relationship between the PhytLa content and the vigour index.
Fig 6.
Effects of La (at LaCl3 concentrations of 0, 20, 100 and 300 mg/L) and acid rain (at a pH of 3.5, 4.5 or 5.5) on the seed vigor index of rice germinated seeds [GI (a), RL (b), FW (c) and DW (d)].
Error bars are standard deviations (n = 4). Different letters indicate significant differences between different treatments at P = 0.05 based on the least significant difference (LSD) test.