A grant has been awarded to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) under the supervision of Dr. Alan M. Jones entitled "Rapid Image Acquisition of Dynamic Arabidopsis Cells and For High-throughput Genetic Screens" for the purpose of acquiring and maintaining a specialized microscope. The enormous progress made in the plant sciences from sequencing the Arabidopsis genome has propelled research to the next higher research plane, where examining how and when cellular proteins interact over time at a high spatial resolution has become the new standard in demand. Both the demand and the need for sophisticated imaging instrumentation have increased, pari passu. However, imaging fluorescently-tagged proteins in plant cells faces several surmountable challenges. One is the dynamic nature of plant cells due to cytoplasmic streaming (rapid cellular movement) that occurs with speeds greater than the speed of standard capture by a standard confocal microscope (which is a specialized microscope that enables one to visualize fluorescently-modified proteins in all kinds of live cells). Therefore, to capture transient protein-protein interactions within plant cells requires a specialized confocal microscope that enables rapid acquisitions nearly simultaneously through the cell, over a short time scale. Reconstitution of this data will be used to produce a 3-dimensional view of plant protein-protein interactions in vivo over time. This grant will enable 8 highly-productive plant scientists at UNC to make significant and faster contributions to fundamental science leading to increased crop production, plant disease resistance, and biofuels production.
The broader impact will occur in the classroom, in public, and in the research labs. The use of a confocal microscope will be introduced to upperclassmen in an intense, hands-on cell biology laboratory. The public will become aware of the power of rapid imaging through an educational display and presentations by the PIs. The plant science group at UNC collectively trains 20 undergraduates, 15 predoctoral, and 30 postdoctoral students each year. The requested instrument will also serve the confocal imaging needs of many additional labs on campus. It is the first of its kind on the UNC campus and only the second like it in the state of North Carolina. Many scientists beyond the plant science group will greatly benefit from this specialized microscope.
