CD BioSciences is committed to developing technologies with high scanning speeds, quantitative imaging and high-quality images to provide our customers with imaging for plant morphogenesis. Our professional technical support will make an essential contribution to your research in the field of plant growth research.

Background

Like other multicellular organisms, plants develop unique three-dimensional shapes as they grow. This process, called morphogenesis, involves the regulation of multiple genes and intercellular communication. Exploring the precise timing and location of events in particular cells is important for understanding the mechanisms that determine the final shape of an organism. With advances in image acquisition and computational analysis techniques, it is possible to realize full 3D/4D visualization of plant development.

A thorough description of morphogenesis at the cell level necessarily requires imaging methods that allow the observation of cell shape in living tissue and the collection of detailed data on cell cycle length, cell division direction, etc. during growth. Using microscopes to take 2D and 3D-lapse videos of living cells are common techniques to study morphogenesis. Imaging technology combined with fluorescent labels can produce a large amount of data, which can be combined into computer simulations to provide key information for studying how tissues or organs in organisms grow to form their final shape.

Fig.1 Surface growth at the shoot apex in Arabidopsis. (Das, 2011)

Our Services

We offer a variety of techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging, confocal laser scanning microscopy and block-face SEM to provide our customers with full 3D volumetric data on plant morphogenesis. The services we offer include, but are not limited to:

• Live tissue-based imaging
  We perform real-time imaging by targeting cell walls, membranes or nuclei using critical fluorescent markers. We provide our clients with the most appropriate marker lines to label the geometry in living plant cells according to the type of analysis being performed.
• Fixed tissue-based imaging
  We use fixed tissues and dynamic developmental series reconstructed using single-cell digital mapping to image plant organs which consistently ordered cellular patterning.
• Nuclear 3D analysis
  We track nuclei over time to represent cell division rates and cell lineages. In addition, we offer a more accurate alternative to nuclear analyses by completely segmenting the cell wall in 3D to extract the full cell geometry.
• 2.5D analysis
  We extract the organ surface and generate a curved image (2.5D) directly from the 3D confocal stack. This method removes artifacts from 2D slices or projections and can be used for organ level analysis, extracting the main directions of growth and studying growth anisotropy.

With a state-of-the-art biophysical analysis platform, CD BioSciences has established a wide range of efficient modern imaging techniques to help our customers obtain detailed structural information on plant morphogenesis. If you need our technical support, please contact us for more details.

Reference

1. Das, P. Imaging and modeling growth and morphogenesis in plants. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development. 2011, 21(5): 606-611.

• Mechanical Analysis of Leaf Growth on Large Scales
• Mechanical Analysis of Twisted Growth in Plant Roots
• Structural Characterization of Tension Wood
• Quantification of Plant Morphogenesis
• Modeling of Plant Morphogenesis
• Analysis of Hygromechanical Behavior of Wood
• Analysis of Leaf Hydraulics