Surveying the plant’s world by magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

Summary Understanding the way in which plants develop, grow and interact with their environment requires tools capable of a high degree of both spatial and temporal resolution. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technique which is able to visualize internal structures and metabolites, has the great virtue that it is non‐invasive and therefore has the potential to monitor physiological processes occurring in vivo. The major aim of this review is to attract plant biologists to MRI by explaining its advantages and wide range of possible applications for solving outstanding issues in plant science. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of MRI in the study of plant physiology and development, plant–environment interactions, biodiversity, gene functions and metabolism. Overall, it is our view that the potential benefit of harnessing MRI for plant research purposes is hard to overrate.

Vaccinia virus-mediated melanin production allows MR and optoacoustic deep tissue imaging and laser-induced thermotherapy of cancer

“…Other advantages vs. fluorescent proteins are the extreme stability of melanin (19), the lack of tissue autofluorescence (in fact, autofluorescence is reduced by melanin, which is another way of detecting the melanin), as well as the fact that no special equipment is needed to visualize the dark pigments. Finally, the ubiquitous presence of melanin in all kingdoms of life suggests that introduction of melanin synthesis as diagnostic/theragnostic marker will be possible in most species, e.g., including plants (20), and should also find translation into clinical settings.…”

Seed Architecture Shapes Embryo Metabolism in Oilseed Rape

“…However, recent developments in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI; Borisjuk et al, 2012) and mass spectrometry have begun to remove this limitation, thereby allowing for the spatial mapping of storage lipids (Neuberger et al, 2009;Fuchs et al, 2013) and their individual components (Horn et al, 2012). In this article, we designed an array of spatial high-resolution techniques, which allowed us not only to visualize steep gradients in oil deposition within the embryo of oilseed rape but also to define their spatial/ temporal relations to those established for the accumulation of starch and storage proteins, cellular growth, photosynthetic activity, and metabolite pattern.…”

Quantitative 3D Analysis of Plant Roots Growing in Soil Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging

“…MRI offers several contrast parameters that can be manipulated for discriminating different structures such as roots from soil background (Rogers and Bottomley, 1987;Jahnke et al, 2009). The basic principles of MRI are described in detail in several textbooks (Callaghan, 1993;Haacke et al, 1999) or review articles (Köckenberger et al, 2004;Blümler et al, 2009;van As et al, 2009;Borisjuk et al, 2012). Research applications to plant roots range from phytopathology (Hillnhütter et al, 2012), across storage root internal structures (Metzner et al, 2014) and water uptake modeling (Stingaciu et al, 2013), to coregistration with positron emission tomography for investigating structure-function relations .…”