This is Science: observing plant growth

One of the problems of modern biology is how to track / capture objects that are constantly in motion. Any parent is faced with this problem when trying to photograph a small child: either the photo has blurred, the focus has swum, or there is not enough contrast. Of course, in biology there are a number of tools for how to achieve the fixation of certain biological objects. For example, the flies can be put to sleep with cold, the cells can be “braked” with the help of chemicals. But what to do if the experiment is to observe the growth of the roots of the plant, which are constantly lengthening and twisting. To get only one series of photographs can take days and even weeks of painstaking constant microscope adjustments. Scientists come to the rescue of the recognition system and automatic image correction!

For microscopic details of plant life, welcome under cat.

A group of scientists from the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology in Vienna created a confocal microscope that automatically tracks the direction of root growth and shifts the sample so that the tip of the root always remains in the center of the frame. In this case, the microscope itself with the help of a laser can excite a fluorescent dye inside biological samples, which increases the image contrast and helps to track the tiniest details.
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The scheme of the microscope and the basic principles of image detection

The principle of operation is quite simple: the last two obtained images are processed, the direction and speed of root growth are calculated, and the microscope adjusts accordingly to these parameters. Next comes a layer-by-layer scanning of this particular area for building a map in 3D. Then select one image with the maximum intensity in the region of interest (ROI), and averaging is performed.


TipTracker's work cycle in detail

The authors of the article also investigated how gravity (to be more precise, its change with respect to growing roots) affects the direction of root growth. This is achieved by turning the whole plant 90 degrees in a specially designed holder. I want to believe that the research data one day shed light on how to grow plants in space conditions with microgravity.


A visual demonstration of how gravity affects the growth direction of a plant's roots.

A cherry on the cake of this study was the direct observation of a group of cells that is in motion inside the zebrafish embryo . The latter is perfectly demonstrated on a video mounted for the Science Magazine website:


Scientists have laid out in open access the created program TipTracker, written in MatLab, so that now other research groups will be able to join the observation of the microcosm of plants and not only.

A news article published in Science Magazine , the original article "Live Tracking Of Planting Roots Slot In Confocal Microscopy For Vertically Grown Plant" is available on bioRxiv.org for free download.

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