Symmetry among leaflets of four forage legumes

The symmetry study among legume leaflets can be a complementary tool to help morphogenetic evaluations. The aim of this work was to determine the symmetry between the initial and terminal leaflets of four forage legumes. The initial leaflets of Calopogonium mucunoides, Neonotonia wightii, Arachis pintoi, Stylosantes spp. and the terminal of Arachis pintoi were used. About 200 leaves of each species were collected in different systems (mixed with grasses and in single cropping). After collecting, leaves were scanned with a millimeter scale like reference on a table scanner HP Photosmart D110 model. Scanned files were inserting to IMAGE TOOL 3.0 software to perform measurements on each leaflet. Were measured length and width and total leaf area of each leaflet. The comparison between each pair of leaflets was carried out on the basis of the real leaf area, using the identity model test with the following hypotheses H0: ?0 = 0 and H0: ?1 = 1 on SAS(R) program at 5% of probability. In addition, the partition of the mean square error prediction (MSEP) was evaluated by Model Evaluation System software. The equality between the pairs of initial leaflets of C. mucunoides, N. wightii, A. pintoi and Stylosantes spp. was identified, presenting P = 0.3402; 0.5210; 0.1588; 0.8773 for the hypothesis of ?0 and P = 0.2218; 0.8791; 0.2409; 0.8347 for the hypothesis of ?1, respectively; and P = 0.7605; 0.7799 for the hypotheses ?0 and ?1 for the terminal leaflet of A. pintoi. The hypotheses H0: ?0 = 0 H0: ?1 = 1 studied were no rejected, the intercept of this line being at the point 0 (zero) and the angular coefficient equal to 1. The assessment of the distribution of MSEP, it was observed that in all the symmetry assessments conducted between the pairs of leaflets more than 99% corresponded to random errors. With the perfect symmetry between the initial leaflets of the four legume plants and terminal leaflets of A. pintoi studied, for the morphogenetic measurements, make the measurements of only one of the leaflets pair is necessary.