Between the two of us, my roommate and I have many flower varieties in our room. I recall seeing plant cells under a microscope in middle school, but looking around my room, I was curious as to the structure of a flower petal. Unlike plant stems and leaves, flower petals seem to lack purpose (other than to attract pollinators) – what is the structure of a flower petal and what does it tell us about its purpose? To explore this, I first placed a sample from my bioengineered petunia under the foldscope. I quickly realized that this was a challenging sample to begin with, as the petals are white and thus it was difficult to tell when it was correctly positioned. I then began collecting samples of colored flower petals from both of our rooms, and found some common themes as I viewed them. Each of the petals seemed to have a similar underlying structure: long, thin components running in the same direction. Interestingly, color does not seem to be distributed evenly across these components – in a sample from a purple flower (below), some of these thin strands were dark purple while others were much lighter:


Despite many attempts, my iPhone camera did not quite pick up the structure through the foldscope in the way that it was visible to the naked eye, but nonetheless you can begin to make out the long, thin, dark purple components of the petal.