Waite researcher Dr Stefanie Wege (DECRA Fellow, School of Agriculture, Food and Wine) recently attended a workshop on Functional live imaging of plants in Nagoya, Japan.
Held in late May 2019, Stefanie was one of 20 applicants selected world-wide to attend the EMBO workshop. Selection was based on her active supervision of students and capacity to transfer the knowledge obtained in plant imaging techniques to other researchers.
The workshop featured lectures by world-class imaging specialists and practical sessions at the excellent imaging facility at Nagoya University. Practicals included light sheet microscopy, chemistry enabled & time-gated imaging, nanosensors, microfluidic functional imaging and two-photon deep tissue cell ablation.
“The knowledge, practical skills, and new collaborations I established will greatly improve my current project; and they also gave me many ideas on how to design future research, which techniques are available and how to employ them to answer specific research questions,” Stefanie said on her return.
“I was very impressed by the latest imaging techniques. For example, chlorophyll autofluorescence is always a challenge when imaging above ground plant tissue, and some widely used fluophores in animal research are not easily suitable for plants, even when using spectral unmixing.”
“The workshop also taught me how to use time-gated imaging to separate chlorophyll and other fluorphores, in this case the mitochondria stain Mito Tracker DeepRed. This technique will help us improve our image qualities and get more information from our samples.”
Contact Stefanie to find out more about these and other plant imaging techniques, details at https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/stefanie.wege
Stefanie Wege with workshop organiser Tetsuya Higashiyama
Photo: Masayoshi Nakamura