Plant Biology Lab 1

Today we simply went over microscope procedures and practice making wet mounts of various plant parts.

Here are several pictures of a flower petal.  The big circles of pink are just cells whose giant vacuoles are full of pigment.  The 3 pictures are all of the same view and I just found it interesting that they look SO different, just with slight adjustments of the microscope or even the angle or temperament of my camera shooting through the eye piece.

This is a side view of a leaf.  On the left (under side I believe) is were stomata would be.  The circular thing in the middle of the picture that I *thought* was a stomate is actually a vascular bundle!

 Again, different settings can change the coloring completely.

Here is water leaf, and we got some bonus little brown flecks, which our professor said are likely diatoms that were in the water with the plant.

The large purple splotches are large diatoms!  The details inside the cells here is beautiful.

Dr. Robbins also showed us this neat video of chloroplasts doing "cyclosis".  Here's the explanation of what that is on the description of this video on YouTube:

Rapid cycling of cytoplasm - cyclosis is seen here as circling of chloroplasts in cells of Elodea canadensis. Chloroplasts normally move in the cell to adapt to changing light conditions; here they are exposed to much too strong light (under the microscope) and they want to move away from it, but in the end they just circle round and round.





So there we go, a simple introduction to our botany lab. More exciting stuff will come in the weeks to follow. :)