Synchrotron-Based X-Ray Fluorescence Microscopy as a Technique for Imaging of Elements in Plants.

Abstract

Understanding the distribution of elements within plant tissues is important across a range of fields in plant science. In this review, we examine synchrotron-based x-ray fluorescence microscopy (XFM) as an elemental imaging technique in plant sciences, considering both its historical and current uses as well as discussing emerging approaches. XFM offers several unique capabilities of interest to plant scientists, including in vivo analyses at room temperature and pressure, good detection limits (approximately 1-100 mg kg -1 ), and excellent resolution (down to 50 nm). This has permitted its use in a range of studies, including for functional characterization in molecular biology, examining the distribution of nutrients in food products, understanding the movement of foliar fertilizers, investigating the behavior of engineered nanoparticles, elucidating the toxic effects of metal(loid)s in agronomic plant species, and studying the unique properties of hyperaccumulating plants. We anticipate that continuing technological advances at XFM beamlines also will provide new opportunities moving into the future, such as for high-throughput screening in molecular biology, the use of exotic metal tags for protein localization, and enabling time-resolved, in vivo analyses of living plants. By examining current and potential future applications, we hope to encourage further XFM studies in plant sciences by highlighting the versatility of this approach.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物組織内元素の分布を可視化・測定するX線蛍光顕微鏡法を植物科学向けの技術としてレビューしており、植物状態の取得手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

This is a review article on synchrotron X-ray fluorescence microscopy in plant sciences. The supplied blocks contain no public phenotype/trait datasets, plant imaging inputs, author analysis code, trained models, or supplements with such assets. Figures reference unpublished data from authors (e.g. 'Data are from A.van

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