Center for Biomolecular Structure Lecture Series

Imaging in Plant Biology is a critical tool for understanding growth and development, particularly for complicated, delicate, and intact structures that produce economically important products such as grains, seeds, flowers, and fruits. Imaging root-soil-microbe interactions is also valuable but problematic as these events occur underground, and most efforts to visualize this environment necessitate disruption of the very systems we want to study. Capturing detailed 3D image data of intact delicate structures and complicated environments is difficult for conventional microscopy as samples must be very small or thin or both for high resolution imaging. Lab-based X-ray tomography (XRT) in general and X-ray microscopy (XRM) specifically bridge this imaging gap by providing multiscale high-resolution 3D tomographic data where cell-level volumes can be situated within the context of the whole tissue, organ, or plant. XRT and XRM are powerful tools for visualizing root-soil-microbe interactions in situ without having to dig up the root system. Correlative imaging is also significantly enhanced by using XRM scan data of whole resin-embedded samples as a road map to guide subsequent nanometer-scale volume electron microscopy (vEM). Methodologies for using XRT and XRM in the multiscale and multimodal analysis of Plant Biology using numerous economically and scientifically important plant systems will be presented.