Bot-graphy: An original technique for plant anatomy study based o metallography

Abstract

Plant anatomists are recurrently looking for safer and faster methods to improve the observations of plants tissues, searching for images with better resolution. Nevertheless, some plant materials are difficult to handle due to their consistency, such as those with very hard tissue or with a combination of soft and hard tissues (e. g. parenchyma and sclerenchyma). In these cases, softening techniques have been developed [1]. But they do not completely solve this problem since their success depends on the thickness of the plant organ (Argentinian anatomists, pers. commun., 2020). To find a solution to this limitation, a standard procedure of metallography is proposed, as an alternative, for the study of plant organs. The standard technique consists of mounting the specimen in a castable resin (liquid polymer film), followed by grinding the sample with abrasive papers of different granulometry and observing the sample surface with optical reflection microscopy [2]. In this work, an example is shown, the basal internodes of 2.5 to 3 cm in diameter of sugarcane, harvested in Famaillá, Tucumán, Argentina.