Poster: Vegetative Development

Abs # 450: In vivo imaging of Arabidopsis shoots and applications for developmental studies

Presenter:	Medford, June I., June.Medford@colostate.edu
Authors	Medford, June I. (A)   Areeves, Aaron  (A)
Affiliations:	(A): Colorado State University

Plants are living three-dimensional organisms that develop continuously throughout their life. Despite the obviousness of this statement, our knowledge about plant development is largely assembled from discontinuous “snap-shots”. Furthermore, our knowledge about key regulatory molecules (e.g., mRNA) typically involves destructive methods (e.g., in situ hybridization, microarrays). We have developed and are using a new imaging technology, OCM (optical coherence microscopy) that allows non-destructive, in vivo imaging of plants. We are extending this technology to allow in vivo imaging of gene expression. We are interested in applying this technology to better understand developmental events in the shoot. We will describe our recent work on OCM showing the ability to image various Arabidopsis mutants such as clavata1, clavata2 and primordia timing. We will show how the data can be viewed as images or as histograms, allowing rapid analysis of samples. We will show that the in vivo OCM images can be viewed as three-dimensional volumes or as computerized “sections” produced in any plane. The "sections" will be produced with software allowing distinction of sub-cellular components.