Lemna Minor
A clean, editable Lemna minor (common duckweed) frond with its single hanging root — ready for plant-biology and ecotoxicology figures, posters, and slides.
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What is Lemna Minor?
Lemna minor, common duckweed, is a tiny free-floating aquatic plant made of small oval green fronds, each with a single thin root hanging into the water below. It is widely used as a model organism in plant biology, ecotoxicology, and water-quality assays, and appears in figures showing growth, toxicity testing, and aquatic ecosystems. With SciFig you describe the frond you need in plain language and generate a clean, editable Lemna minor duckweed, ready to relabel and export.
Why the plant is drawn rather than photographed
- The organism is a few millimetres across, so photographs of a culture vessel show a green film, not a plant. Only a drawing can show the individual frond, its root, and a daughter frond emerging from the mother — the structures the endpoints are actually counted on.
- It is a regulatory test species. OECD Test Guideline 221 (Lemna growth inhibition) makes frond number and frond area the measured endpoints over a 7-day exposure, so a figure that shows those structures is showing the readout.
- Its body plan is genuinely reduced — no distinct stem or leaf, a single unbranched root — and a generic aquatic-plant clipart misrepresents that morphology in a way anyone in the field will spot immediately.
- Clonal, vegetative reproduction is the whole basis of its use as a model: a colony descends from budding, not seed, which is why growth rate is measured as frond doubling and why the drawing needs to show the budding pouch.
- Doubling times of roughly 1.5–3 days under standard conditions make it a fast growth-inhibition assay, and workflow schematics need a compact glyph to place at each time point.
Structures to draw and label
- The frond — a small, flat, oval to obovate green body, typically 2–5 mm long, with 3 (occasionally 1–5) faint veins radiating from the node. It is a fused leaf-stem structure, not a leaf.
- The single unbranched root hanging beneath, with a root cap or sheath at its base and a distinct root tip. One root per frond is diagnostic: the closely related Spirodela bears several, and Wolffia bears none.
- The reproductive (budding) pouches — two lateral cavities at the base of the frond from which daughter fronds emerge. Drawing a daughter frond still attached to the mother at the pouch is what shows vegetative propagation.
- The colony state: mother plus 2–4 attached daughters is the typical unit counted in an assay, and a top-down view of a mat is how a test vessel actually looks.
- The air/water interface, since the plant is free-floating with the upper frond surface hydrophobic and emergent and the root submerged — this orientation matters in any uptake or toxicity figure.
- Endpoint cues where the figure is about a bioassay: chlorosis (yellowing), necrosis, frond breakup, and root shortening, all standard scored responses to a toxicant.
Where the plant appears in figures
- Ecotoxicology: OECD 221 growth-inhibition assays, EC50 dose–response panels for herbicides, metals, pharmaceuticals, and effluents.
- Phytoremediation and water-treatment schematics — nutrient (N, P) stripping from wastewater, heavy-metal uptake, and constructed-wetland diagrams.
- Plant biology and physiology figures using it as a fast-cycling model: nutrient limitation, photosynthesis, circadian and flowering studies.
- Bioeconomy and feed/biomass papers, where the plant's high protein content and rapid biomass accumulation are the subject.
- Freshwater ecology diagrams: floating-macrophyte cover, light attenuation of the water column below, and eutrophication dynamics.
- Method panels for culture and assay setup — sterile stock culture, Steinberg or SIS medium, frond transfer, and the multi-well or beaker layout of the exposure.
Lemna Minor— templates & examples
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