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THESE ethereal forms are no exotic marine creatures 鈥� they are botany鈥檚 answer to the lab rat.
Since 2000, when it became the first plant to have its genome fully sequenced, Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as thale cress, has been the focus of hundreds of investigations into gene function. Here, the deep red body of the cress is the carpel, the female sexual organ. Although the redness results from a dye, the glow from the whole image comes from natural fluorescent radiation by plant cell walls. The mass of straggly yellow 鈥渄readlocks鈥� is the stigma, the organ that admits pollen to fertilise the plant, and the green lobes to either side are petals. The green blobs visible on the carpel and petals are pollen grains that have recently tumbled down.
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鈥淭here are some very beautiful things in flowers that you don鈥檛 normally see because they鈥檙e so small, so I try to bring these out,鈥� says Heiti Paves of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. He took the shots using a confocal laser scanning microscope. In real life, the cress is about 10 to 20 centimetres tall. 鈥淎ll this was made just for fun using plants and materials left over from experiments,鈥� adds Paves, who has won awards for his magnified shots of thale cress.
As a botanist, Paves is interested in the plant鈥檚 scientific value as much as its beauty. He and his colleagues are trying to discover why plants have myosins. In animals, these proteins are vital for the functioning of muscles. But plants don鈥檛 have muscles. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know yet what they鈥檙e for,鈥� he says, adding that nothing happens to Arabidopsis if any of its 17 myosin genes are individually switched off. 鈥淲e see some differences in double and triple mutants, with two to three myosin genes knocked out, but it鈥檚 still too early to establish the functions of myosin in plant cells,鈥� he says.
Fittingly, the DNA, which sits in each cell nucleus and is the subject of Paves鈥檚 research, is visible as the blue specks that pervade the picture. It has been stained with a special light-blue dye.