Vertical-stage confocal microscopy for live imaging of growing plants

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As all gardeners know, plant roots grow vertically downwards, and they do this by responding to gravity. Understanding how this happens, how roots develop and respond to their environment is essential to improving nutrient and water uptake in plants, which will ultimately help us improve agricultural productivity to feed the world. Plant growth and development are complex processes that are regulated by several proteins and other molecules within cells. Understanding where in the cells these proteins normally reside, and how they move within cells either during normal developmental processes or in response to environmental stimuli is an important first step in understanding the molecular pathways that regulate plant growth responses, and microscopy is a common tool used to study this. However, most microscopes are only equipped with a horizontal stage, which means that plants cannot be imaged in their natural vertical orientiation. As plants respond to gravity, placing them in a horizontal orientation perturbs their normal behaviour, making it difficult to draw valid conclusions about the normal plant response to gravity. The new horizontally-mounted confocal microscope will allow us, for the first time, to use powerful confocal microscopy to image vertical plant roots in their natural orientation at high resolution (with fine detail). This cutting edge vertical microscope will enable us to image proteins and other molecules in their native orientation within cells, as well as allow the dynamic live imaging of movement of these molecules in response to different environmental signals and during growth and development.