PLANT MICROTECHNIQUE WITH RESIN - TOWARDS PLANT HISTOLOMICS

Abstract

Plant microtechnique; a laborious discipline that provides little data. The difficulty in handling paraffin sections and the lack of a strategy for analyzing micrographs discourage its use. Nevertheless, it provides the fundamental cellular context for understanding the function of biomolecules. In this work, we standardized a resin embedding method, a chemical treatment for slides, a trichrome staining, and an immunostaining. We also developed a strategy for micrograph segmentation, morphometric and compositional analysis, and proposed the basis for a histolomic field. The resin-based microtechnique was easier than the paraffin-based ones, revealed a wealth of morphological and compositional information, and was reproducible in a variety of tissues of plant species. Histolomics allowed numerical comparisons of primary morphometric and compositional features such as size or protein content, as well as composite features such as the C₄ kranz anatomy. This method takes the cellular context to the field of omics.