Live imaging of stomata in Tulips

Aug 30, 2015 • 11:14 PM UTC

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Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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Today we received beautiful bundle of flowers. It’s rare that we get flowers for our house – so I spent the time setting them up. It was very clear very quickly that it was time for me to setup a live imaging session on a flower pot – thus I finally decided to undertake the task of imaging stomata in live plants.
I don’t have all my results in as yet; since I just setup a time lapse (1 image per min) for an overnight session. Tomorrow morning; I will stop and see what I captured. But before I setup a day long time lapse; I also did a quick time lapse of stomata cells drying(dessicating).
This was done by peeling a layer of cells from the top surface of the tulip leaves. I also setup a imaging session using a foldscope, my iPhone and the flower pot. Attached is a picture of the setup.
I use an app called lapse it – but also the native apple app can also be used very well. A little bit of masking tape made everything stable.

Tomorrow morning when I stop the time lapse; I will process and share the movie. I just have to sleep with the anticipation that my Folscope is hard at work while I am sleeping tonight.

Just finished the time lapse. It lasted from 10:30pm in night to 8:30am in the morning. Images at 1 frame per minute; but rendered at 20fps. So 1 second is 20 minutes or so.. Watch the very last bit when the sun rises; and the stomata start to open 🙂
If you move the cursor fast enough; you clearly see the stomata open quickly. To show this effect more clearly; I processed this movie to play at a faster frame rate (110fps – data collected at 1 frame per minute). I also used sketch filter to highlight the shape of the stomata. Here is the video:

More to follow up on this soon..
Cheers
Manu
Next steps:
1) As @Laks suggested below – I will now test the influence of color of light but also try to see if my breathing locally (which changes local CO2 conc can actually change the stomata stage).
2) Second I will do a simple calculation to check how a small change in stomata opening changes the amount of O2 diffusion and water vapor loss by a plant. As can be assumed – although CO2 needs to be diffused in as a carbon source – the plant wants to minimize loss of water. So what’s optimal size of stomata opening.
So many questions to ask.. 🙂