Plants with purple abaxial leaves: A repository of metrics from stomata distribution

Abstract

Plants with purple abaxial leaves are very common in nature but the ecophysiological aspects of this phenotype are not well known. We observed here that the purple color of the abaxial tegument in extant plants make stomata completely visible. Based in it we measured the relations between stomatic density and distance between stomata pairs and observed a general log-normal trend line between density and interstomatic distance. These data shows that measures of stomatic distances at purple abaxial leaves are able to be a sensor to environmental changes of living purple plants. In future ecophysiological inferences will be established from the information brought by the measurements of the distance between stomata in purple plants.