To cultivate crops like lettuce that can better withstand diseases, researchers from Delft University of Technology and Utrecht University have developed a method that allows for imaging common plant infections. For the first time, this can be done without killing the plant and significantly faster than conventional microscopy.
"Until now, researchers had to kill a plant for each step in the process, stain it, and then examine it under a microscope," says Jeroen Kalkman, associate professor in imaging physics. "Now, with this new imaging technique, we can track how a disease develops in a living plant in real-time."
Mapping plant diseases
"The technique we used is called dynamic optical coherence tomography (dOCT)," says De Wit. "It involves emitting light and measuring the time it takes for that light to reflect, similar to ultrasound but with light instead of sound. In just one and a half seconds, we can capture around 50 to 100 images of an infected lettuce leaf.
"We can effectively map plant diseases with dOCT because the pathogens move more than the plant cells. By assigning colors to areas with more movement, we can generate a strong contrast between the pathogen and the plant. Without dOCT, the disease would only be visible at a much later stage."
Read more at: phys.org