Plant Root Study with New Techniques
Emo_CutE_GiRl_ 2013/07/20 15:26
Plant roots, while being extremely important to the health of a plant, alsotend to be extremely difficult to study something about them being underground. So inorder to help make it possible to study root growth without having to turn to expensive and slow x-ray tools, one team of researchers has combined laser tracking with a transparent soil they previously developed.
The transparent soil combines transparent plastic particles soaked ina clear liquid to create a substrate that shares many of the properties ofsoil.
The laser tracking works in the following manner: an optical system spreads the beam from ablue-green laser into a thin sheet. The light passes straight through the transparent soil, but bounces off roots. By imaging perpendicular tothe light sheet plane, the researchers get a 2D image with one shot, and by moving the sample upand down, they can capture a series of 2D slices that can be used to build a 3D image of the roots.