Kin recognition by self-referent phenotype matching in plants

Abstract

When plants of Arabidopsis thaliana are cultivated in rows ofcoetaneous kin neighbours (plants of the same accession) thegrowth of their leaves is horizontally reoriented towards the emptyspaces out of the row, increasing self-shading and reducing mutualshading among plants (Fig. 1a). This growth pattern is notobserved among nonkin plants (plants of a different accession) ornoncoetaneous plants. The leaf-position response requires similarbody shapes and hence vertical light profiles perceived byneighbours, a requisite not fulfilled by nonkin plants (Fig. 1c).Based on these observations Crepy & Casal (2015) concluded thatplants are able to recognize kin neighbours by the matching of theirbody shapes (phenotype matching). In their letter Till-Bottraud&de Villemereuil (2015) question whether this is actually a case of?kin recognition or phenotype matching?.