Morning glory pollen

Images made through a microscope. All subject types.

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blepharopsis
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Morning glory pollen

Post by blepharopsis »

Hear are some confocal images of morning glory pollen grains attached to the flower's stigma (edited - thanks, Rik!). Agarose sections imaged with Zeiss LSM 980 at 10, 25 and 40x objective magnification.
MG-NEW-4-25x-gigapixel-standard-scale-2_00x.jpg
Depth color-coded version of the above image:
4-fire1-gigapixel-standard-scale-2_00x.jpg
10x2-psyrain2-c3-gigapixel-standard-scale-2_00x.jpg
mg-25x-3-c2-fire-2.jpg
MG-NEW-3-25x-gigapixel-standard-scale-2_00x.jpg
MG-40x-C2-fire.jpg
Same as above, but with find edges filer applied before flattening the stack:
MG-40x-C1-edges--fire-gigapixel-standard-scale-2_00x.jpg
Last edited by blepharopsis on Thu Oct 27, 2022 7:23 am, edited 2 times in total.

iconoclastica
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by iconoclastica »

=D> Having seen this, I don't think I'll ever have the courage again to show my fern spores to anyone...
Pretty big pollen though, must be what, about 250 µm?
--- felix filicis ---

Adalbert
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by Adalbert »

very nice :smt038

RogelioMoreno
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by RogelioMoreno »

Beautiful set as always. =D>

Hope to do confocal near that quality!

Rogelio

Sym P. le
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by Sym P. le »

I love these images, not only for the renditions, clarity and detail but more so because it offers a clear picture of how the pollen interacts with the stigma (thanks Rik), something which I've never even seen an attempt of an explanation. Maybe I'm the only one that's missed this through all these years?
Last edited by Sym P. le on Thu Oct 27, 2022 7:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

blepharopsis
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by blepharopsis »

iconoclastica wrote:
Wed Oct 26, 2022 11:16 am
=D> Having seen this, I don't think I'll ever have the courage again to show my fern spores to anyone...
Pretty big pollen though, must be what, about 250 µm?
Fern spores are so cool!
Those pollen grain are ~135 µm diameter, with spikes. :)

rjlittlefield
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by rjlittlefield »

Wonderful pictures!

One niggle: I'm thinking the word should be "stigma", not "stamen".

We're looking at the receptive part at the end of the pistil, right?

--Rik

blepharopsis
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by blepharopsis »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Wed Oct 26, 2022 9:14 pm
Wonderful pictures!

One niggle: I'm thinking the word should be "stigma", not "stamen".

We're looking at the receptive part at the end of the pistil, right?

--Rik
Thanks, Rik! I should have refreshed my flower anatomy nomenclature before posting :) Yes, this is definitely a lady part of the flower!

Olympusman
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by Olympusman »

SUPERB!

Mike
Michael Reese Much FRMS EMS Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

RogelioMoreno
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by RogelioMoreno »

Igor,

Did you used some dye or it was auto fluorescence?
Please details about the lasers wavelength.

Rogelio

blepharopsis
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by blepharopsis »

RogelioMoreno wrote:
Fri Oct 28, 2022 4:28 am
Igor,

Did you used some dye or it was auto fluorescence?
Please details about the lasers wavelength.

Rogelio
I used Congo Red and, except the first 2 images from the top (3 if you count the depth color-coded one), Calcofluor White. I used 405, 488 and 560 nm laser lines in simultaneous mode. The blue and green aurofluorescence is strong enough, that's why I dropped Calcofluor in the second round of preps.

Marcepstein
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by Marcepstein »

The clarity of the images is truly amazing.

Sumguy01
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by Sumguy01 »

=D> Very nice set.
Thanks for sharing.

iconoclastica
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by iconoclastica »

As I understand it the Zeiss LSM 980 is a laser scanning confocal microscope, designed for use with fluorescense. Thise pollen grain is not much fluorescent, I think, yet it shows a measure of detail I can only dream of (I am having such dreams, in fact!). SO, fluorescense is not mandatory to get excellent results? Which of the many techniques of LSCM does make this superesolution?
--- felix filicis ---

Pau
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Re: Morning glory pollen

Post by Pau »

iconoclastica wrote:
Fri Nov 04, 2022 8:19 am
SO, fluorescense is not mandatory to get excellent results? Which of the many techniques of LSCM does make this superesolution?
This is FLUORESCENCE. Pollen grains are fluorescent by themselves (autofluorescence) and also can be stained with fluorochromes
Confocal refers to the coincidence of the focus points of the objective image and of the excitation light source excluding the fluorescence of out of focus parts of the sample that degrades the image of wide-field (classic) fluorescence images. AFAIK there is not confocal without fluorescence. The term superresolution refers to resolution below the Abbe's diffraction limit. It would need more explanation and even more how to achieve it.
Take a look at the Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confocal_microscopy
Pau

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