Macro to Micro: Quantitative Plant Imaging Across Scales

Plants are one of the most important lifeforms on our planet, making up the vast majority of biomass on earth as well as being the basis for planetary food supply. To feed a growing population and aid food security, we must understand how plants develop and interact with their environments. These physiological and developmental programs are the summation of dynamic processes occurring at different scales – where single molecules can dictate and mediate whole plant responses and growth. Therefore, to truly understand and harness plant growth we must understand the interplay of these processes within and across multiple scales from the whole plant to cellular and ultrastructure levels.

This Workshop will showcase and bring together interdisciplinary researchers utilising imaging across different spatial levels in plants. It aims to forge links across these differing imaging areas to increase our holistic understanding of plant physiology. We will have sessions dedicated to methodologies and applications of imaging at:

• Whole plant and tissue scales (e.g. Macroscopes, automated growth chambers, biosensors)
• Cellular and Subcellar scales (e.g. organelle dynamics, organelle-organelle contact sites, super-resolution imaging)
• Ultrastructural scales (e.g. CryoEM, serial block face EM)
• Quantification (e.g. AnalyzER, machine-learning analysis)

A key feature of this workshop is that we have invited ‘non-plant’ experts to provide an ‘outside’ perspective for each of the sessions listed above. This is to stimulate cross model interdisciplinary conversations to further push the boundaries of plant quantitative imaging.