PLANTS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

This is not a traditional science textbook - in fact, this is not meant to be a “text”book at all. My main goal is to convey the inherent beauty of plants to you - the very reason that drove me to study plants in the first place. As such, this e-book has been designed to be a complement rather than a substitute for information-rich textbooks. I am a plant cell biologist by training and use microscopes to study the overall morphology of plants and the detailed cellular and sub-cellular anatomy of plant cells. I am a visual learner myself and I have written this e-book for readers with similar learning tendencies and curiosities. Through my decade-long work with light, fluorescence, and electron microscopy, I have amassed a catalog of micrographs that vividly illustrates the architecture of plants and the diversity of cell types that constitute the plant body. In a sense, I have found microscopy to be a tool with which I search art in science. It is my hope that you will share the same awe and wonder that I feel when I explore the beautiful, immersive microscopic world of the plant cells.

This e-book has been broadly divided into two parts - the first dealing with the anatomy of plant cells and organelles, and the second with the overall morphology of the plant structure. In doing so, we will first explore the general anatomy of the plant cell and then tour the organelles. And in surveying the different parts of a typical plant, i.e. leaves, stem, roots, and flowers, we will also look at the different cell types that comprise each of the tissues. This e-book is not an encyclopedia of definitions and molecular mechanisms. I am going to trust your internet savvy in looking up definitions of terms you do not understand in this interactive e-book, and use a textbook as a comprehensive reference. I hope to constantly update this webpage to include new fluorescence and electron micrographs and truly make this webpage a comprehensive "Plant Atlas" of sorts. In the future, my major focus will be to incorporate three-dimensional microscopic renderings of plant cells and organelles obtained from state-of-the-art fluorescence and electron microscopes so that we can fully appreciate the plant microscopic world in its three-dimensional wonder.

Copyright

The work presented here is totally open-access and free to share, especially for non-commercial and educational purposes. However, I do expect that you cite this website as the source for any images and/or text contained herein that you share with others.