LGP25B3 - Riding with Rhizomes!

Jun 07, 2025 • 4:49 PM UTC

India

340x Magnification

Plants

Karthik Agarwal

Hi! I'm a student from India, currently studying in 10th grade (ICSE board).

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A rhizome is an underground stem growing on the soil surface. Rhizomes grow horizontally and help in vegetative propagation and food storage. They consist of nodes which develop roots and shoots that grow perpendicular to the ground.

Let us take a close look at a fern rhizome through a Foldscope 2.0!

At 50X magnification, we get to see concentric rings of cells, stained purple and blue in color. At the very heart of these rings is a mass of cells that appear blood-red in color. All the cells appear to be packed close together, with little to no intercellular spaces.

Another picture taken at 50X magnification focuses on these hexagonal-shaped cells, with well-defined corners and edges. This shape of cell is a common pattern I’ve noticed in other samples as well, such as in onion skin cells. This structure allows cells to fill up available space in the most efficient way possible, and also maintain great mechanical stability. We can also take note of how some edges and corners of the cell walls are thickened.

Zooming into specific clusters of cells at 140X magnification gives us a better view of the cell wall thickenings. The way the cell walls are lignified at specific corners/points reminds me of how collenchyma tissue has such thickenings.

At the greatest magnification of 340X, we can observe the cells up close. It is clearly visible how the cell connectivity is maximizing space efficiency here. The hexagonal-shaped cells allow for tiling to be done in which there is no wasted space. In each dead cell, we can see how the protoplasm has shrunken away from the cell wall.

And that concludes our exploration into the fern rhizome!