In the course of cooperative corn-disease investigations carried on by the Division of Cereal Crops and Diseases of the United States Department of Agriculture and the Department of Agronomy of the University of Illinois, several inbred strains of yellow dent corn, Zea mays indentata, have been developed, which, after a number of generations (8 to 12) of inbreeding and selection, have become practically uniform in most visible or external characteristics, and perhaps somewhat less uniform in certain functional or internal characteristics, notably their reactions to some of the disease-producing organisms and to exposure to low and high temperatures. However, it was observed that when these inbred strains were planted on differently treated soils the responses to fertilizer treatment were distinctly lacking in uniformity among the different single-ear progenies within a given inbred line, among the different plants of many single-ear progenies, and also among certain first-generation crosses. These differences were particularly striking in the case of response to phosphate fertilizer applications. It was at once apparent that an understanding of the physiological and chemical aspects of these differences in nutritional capacity within the same species would add to the knowledge of plant metabolism, and might also contribute to the practical end of more advantageous use of fertilizers and better adaptation of corn varieties or strains to soil environment. The work of producing the strains used and their behavior in the field will not be discussed in the present paper. This paper is concerned with a preliminary study of the distribution of various chemical forms of phosphorus in the corn plant at various stages of its development, and the distribution of the total phosphorus among four groups of compounds, organic and inorganic, in two first-generation crosses.

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