Positron emission tomography detector development for plant biology

Abstract

There are opportunities for the development of new tools to advance plant biology research through the use of radionuclides. Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Duke University, West Virginia University and the University of Maryland are collaborating on the development of radionuclide imaging technologies to facilitate plant biology research. Biological research into optimizing plant productivity under various environmental constraints, biofuel and carbon sequestration research are areas that could potentially benefit from new imaging technologies. Using 11 CO 2 tracers, the investigators at Triangle University Nuclear Laboratory / Duke University Phytotron are currently researching the dynamical responses of plants to environmental changes forecasted from increasing greenhouse trace gases involved in global change. The biological research primary focus is to investigate the impact of elevated atmospheric CO 2 and nutrients limitation on carbon and nitrogen dynamics in plants. We report here on preliminary results of 11 CO 2 plant imaging experiments involving barley plants using Jefferson Lab dual planar positron emission tomography detectors to image 11 CO 2 in live barley plants. New detector designs will be developed based on the preliminary studies reported here and further planned.

Real‐time whole‐plant dynamics of heavy metal transport inArabidopsis halleriandArabidopsis thalianaby gamma‐ray imaging

“…In experiments with whole plants and radiolabeled molecules, the biodistribution of the radiolabel is most typically analyzed by plant dissection and counting in a well counter, and for β‐emitters, by ashing the plant biomass and counting the radiolabel with a liquid scintillation counter. Several whole plant positron emission tomography (PET) imaging systems have been developed using 11 C (Jahnke et al., ; Kawachi et al., ; Weisenberger et al., ), other groups have developed large scanners for β‐imaging using 32 P (Kanno et al., ), and autoradiography has been used to image radioisotope distribution of whole plants (Page & Feller, ). A scanner (Kawachi et al., ) has been used to perform PET imaging of 65 Zn and 107 Cd in rice plants (Fontanili et al., ; Suzui, Yin, Ishii, Sekimoto, & Kawachi, ).…”

Real-time whole-plant dynamics of heavy metal transport inArabidopsis halleriandArabidopsis thalianaby gamma-ray imaging

“…In experiments with whole plants and radiolabeled molecules, the biodistribution of the radiolabel is most typically analyzed by plant dissection and counting in a well counter, and for β-emitters, by ashing the plant biomass and counting the radiolabel with a liquid scintillation counter. Several whole plant positron emission tomography (PET) imaging systems have been developed using 11 C (Jahnke et al, 2009;Weisenberger et al, 2009;Kawachi et al, 2011), other groups have developed large scanners for β-imaging using 32 P (Kanno et al, 2007), and autoradiography has been used to image radioisotope distribution of whole plants (Page and Feller, 2005). A scanner (Kawachi et al, 2011) has been used to perform PET imaging of 65 Zn and 107 Cd in rice plants (Fontanili et al, 2016;Suzui et al, 2017).…”

Setup and characterisation according to NEMA NU 4 of the phenoPET scanner, a PET system dedicated for plant sciences

“…The first in vivo measurements were then conducted with collimated detectors (Moorby et al 1963, Magnuson et al 1982, Jahnke et al 1989. The next technological step was the introduction of position sensitive detector arrays to obtain 2D-projections of the activity distribution (Kiyomiya et al 2001, Kiser et al 2008, Weisenberger et al 2009. In the recent years plant dedicated PET system have been developed (Beer et al 2010, Wang et al 2014, Chang et al 2018, Kurita et al 2019.…”