Morphometrics Reveals Complex and Heritable Apple Leaf Shapes
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
spp.) is a widely grown and valuable fruit crop. Leaf shape is important for flowering in apple and may also be an early indicator for other agriculturally valuable traits. We examined 9,000 leaves from 869 unique apple accessions using linear measurements and comprehensive morphometric techniques. We identified allometric variation as the result of differing length-to-width aspect ratios between accessions and species of apple. The allometric variation was due to variation in the width of the leaf blade, not the length. Aspect ratio was highly correlated with the first principal component (PC1) of morphometric variation quantified using elliptical Fourier descriptors (EFDs) and persistent homology (PH). While the primary source of variation was aspect ratio, subsequent PCs corresponded to complex shape variation not captured by linear measurements. After linking the morphometric information with over 122,000 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), we found high SNP heritability values even at later PCs, indicating that comprehensive morphometrics can capture complex, heritable phenotypes. Thus, techniques such as EFDs and PH are capturing heritable biological variation that would be missed using linear measurements alone.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it