Laser-Sharp Vision

摘要

Penn State undergraduate Benjamin. Hall started cutting slices of corn roots with a pulsing laser in 2012, thinking he was just helping streamline the tedious job of preparing plant samples for study. Little did he know he was pioneering a whole new imaging technique. The corn-slicing project originated with a problem faced by Jonathan Lynch, a plant biologist on campus. Lynch is hunting for strains of corn that grow well in drought and substandard soils, traits that could help feed a growing global population in a warming world. To identify the most promising strains, Lynch's laboratory studies, among other things, variation in structures inside corn roots. But prepping roots for microscopic study is labor intensive. One person can create only 30 to 40 sections a day. Lynch's lab faced a backlog of more than 20,000 roots.