As promised, here’s part two of my selection of recently published plant methods and resources.
Nisar et al. (2012; Plant Methods 8:50) present a method for easy inflorescence stem grafting in Arabidopsis. I can’t vouch for its ease, but the typical clear Plant Methods format provides plenty of description and comprehensive materials and methods section as well as a step-by-step guide to their customised wedge-cleft grafting technique. The authors even provide a table of technical tricks for each step in the protocol.
Abraham and Elbaum (2012; New Phyt. 197:1012-9) present a method of quantifying microfibril angle in secondary cell walls. The method is technical enough only to be of interest to researchers who need to know the angle of secondary cell wall microfibrils – this is not a look-see ‘Friday afternoon experiment,’ as my old supervisor used to say. To get a full picture, scanning electron microscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering, raman microspectroscopy should all be used in addition to the new technique, which is based on customised polarized light microscopy and LC-PolScope, an imaging software.
Cui et al. (2013; Plant Phys. 161: 36-47) demonstrate that the Tnt1 retrotransposon is a powerful tool for functional genomes in soybean. 62% of insertions from Agrobacterium-mediated transformations using a Tnt1 vector were into annotated genes, indicating the Tnt1 element preferentially inserts into protein-coding regions. Multiple insertions occurred per transformation, and the transposons did not jump under normal growth conditions. The authors obtained the Tnt1 transposon from plasmid pHLV4909, which contains the entire sequence, and cloned it into the binary vector pZY101 for the transformations.
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