Synchrotron XFM tomography for elucidating metals and metalloids in hyperaccumulator plants.

Abstract

Visualizing the endogenous distribution of elements within plant organs affords key insights in the regulation of trace elements in plants. Hyperaccumulators have extreme metal(loid) concentrations in their tissues, which make them useful models for studying metal(loid) homeostasis in plants. X-ray-based methods allow for the nondestructive analysis of most macro and trace elements with low limits of detection. However, observing the internal distributions of elements within plant organs still typically requires destructive sample preparation methods, including sectioning, for synchrotron X-ray fluorescence microscopy (XFM). X-ray fluorescence microscopy-computed tomography (XFM-CT) enables "virtual sectioning" of a sample thereby entirely avoiding artefacts arising from destructive sample preparation. The method can be used on frozen-hydrated samples, as such preserving "life-like" conditions. Absorption and Compton scattering maps obtained from synchrotron XFM-CT offer exquisite detail on structural features that can be used in concert with elemental data to interpret the results. In this article we introduce the technique and use it to reveal the internal distribution of hyperaccumulated elements in hyperaccumulator plant species. XFM-CT can be used to effectively probe the distribution of a range of different elements in plant tissues/organs, which has wide ranging applications across the plant sciences.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物組織内の元素分布と構造を非破壊・三次元で取得するXFM-CT手法を導入し、ハイパーアキュムレーター植物で実証しており、植物表現型取得法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks contain no paper-specific public datasets, images, code, models, or supplements. The only URLs present are the license link, ORCID profiles, and the henke.lbl.gov X-ray constants site, which is a generic external resource cited as reference 28, not an authors' asset for this paper's phenotyping data

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