Tag: Tools and techniques

Genetic studies in Arabidopsis have identified a lot of the participants in signal transduction pathways, but often its less clear precisely where they function. As an example, although it is well known that H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) production by RBOHs in the apoplast triggers many downstream cellular…

Clearly, the mechanical properties of plant cell walls have important implications for growth and development, but they are not necessarily easy to measure, especially in intact, living tissues. Here, Alonso-Baez et al. used Brillouin microscopy and molecular rotors to characterize cell wall properties…

Many biological questions, from tissue-level patterning to subcellular organization, demand 3D imaging with spatial resolution beyond the limits of conventional light microscopy, or even super-resolution microscopy. Expansion microscopy (ExM) offers an elegant solution by physically enlarging biological…

The bid to understand long distance Ca2+ signaling patterns in co-ordinating whole-plant responses to systemic or induced defense have been scarce in soil-grown plants mainly due to limitations of conventional microscopy. Macro Plant Projection Imaging (MAPPI), a real-time, low-cost, dual-view fluorescence…

Reading this review brought to mind some well-known lyrics starting “You don’t know what you’ve got …”  Joni Mitchell followed with “till its gone,” whilst Blink-182 suggested “till it’s almost gone”. A major challenge for plant scientists today is to find out what we have before…

Directed evolution aims to identify variants of a gene of interest (GOI) with improved or novel functions by accelerating mutation and selection under experimental conditions. However, in planta platforms have been hindered by slow plant cell division. Recently, Zhu et al. introduced the geminivirus…

This review by Rai et al., part of a focus collection on metabolism, comprehensively covers the role of metabolomics in plant biology: its history, its tools and techniques, and its impact. As the authors point out, metabolomics bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype by providing a direct readout…

Cells are as small as life gets, but can be much larger than they appear if given room for expansion. This is possible with expansion microscopy, a technique that enables three dimensional cell imaging by physically expanding cellular components for visualization. Although expansion microscopy has been…