Investigating the Shape of the Shoot Apical Meristem in Bamboo Using a Superellipse Equation.

The shoot apical meristem is the origin of bamboo wood. Its structure and morphology are important for maintaining the normal development of bamboo wood. However, the traditional method to describe the morphology of the shoot apical meristem in bamboo or other plants only depends on qualitative approaches. Here we present a protocol for precisely describing the morphology of bamboo shoot apical meristem, which is adapted from our recently published papers ( Shi et al., 2015 ; Wei et al., 2017 ).