Seeds? Ah, seeds, right, but I’m not doing the seed science — I’m studying plants.
….a scientist’s focus often needs to be narrow, otherwise, things would get overwhelming.
These days, though, I smile when I hear it. With each sample, I’m realizing how important it is to understand the seed to really grasp plant development. It’s not just the early stages, but also how stress affects offspring production. The properties of seeds are crucial not only for early growth and development of plants, but also for assessing production and offspring. The influences of factors such as stress, cold, drought, salinity, and other environmental factors are clearly visible in the offspring. Aborted seeds, in particular, are evidence of sub-optimal growth conditions. However, aborted seeds can also serve as an important descriptive trait for mutations and can thus be a perfect phenotype highlighting the relationship between a disabled gene and seed production. Using tools like microscopy or more often scanners, it’s hard to tell if a seed is aborted or how common situation it is (what is the total amount of aborts in population)
With Boxeed, You can view seeds from different angles and identify the conditions that cause abortion. It makes it easier to understand the patterns.
The image shows a seed analyzed from 0° and 90°, and the graph shows how aborted seeds form a distinct, automatically sortable group. Counting the percentage of such seeds in the population? Easy as pie!
