A high-throughput imaging system to quantitatively analyze the growth dynamics of plant seedlings†
Abstract
Most current methods for analyzing the growth rate of plant seedlings are limited to low-throughput experimental configurations. We have developed an automatic system to investigate the dynamics of the growth of hypocotyls using Arabidopsis as model. This system is able to capture time-lapse infrared images of 24 seedlings automatically, with a spatial resolution of 2 μm per pixel and temporal interval of 5 min. Seedling length is rapidly calculated using automated geometric image-processing algorithms. With this high-throughput platform, we have investigated the genotype dependent difference of growth patterns, as well as the response to