Ultra-spatial synchrotron radiation for imaging molecular chemical structure: Applications in plant and animal studies

Peiqiang Yu

doi:10.1155/2007/743101

Abstract

Synchrotron-based Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (S-FTIR) has been developed as a rapid, direct, non-destructive, bioanalytical technique. This technique takes advantage of synchrotron light brightness and small effective source size and is capable of exploring the molecular chemical features and make-up within microstructures of a biological tissue without destruction of inherent structures at ultra-spatial resolutions within cellular dimension. To date there has been very little application of this advanced synchrotron technique to the study of plant and animal tissues' inherent structure at a cellular or subcellular level. In this article, a novel approach was introduced to show the potential of the newly developed, advanced synchrotron-based analytical technology, which can be used to reveal molecular structural-chemical features of various plant and animal tissues.

Highlights

Synchrotron-based Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (S-FTIR) has been developed as a rapid, direct, non-destructive, bioanalytical technique
Synchrotron-based FTIR microspectroscopy can be used to increase the fundamental understanding of the molecular chemical structures of plant and animal tissues within cellular dimensions
To demonstrate how the S-FTIR can be used for imaging plant molecular chemical structure to reveal plant structure characteristics, the following is a review of applications of the synchrotron-based technique

Summary

Synchrotron and infrared microspectroscopy

Synchrotron radiation-based FTIR microspectroscopy (S-FTIR) has been developed as a rapid, direct, non-destructive and non-invasive bioanalytical technique This technique takes advantage of synchrotron light brightness (which is usually 100–1000 times brighter than conventional globar source and has small effective source size), is capable of exploring the molecular chemistry within microstructures of biological samples with high signal to noise ratio at ultra-spatial resolutions as fine as 3–10 μm [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. To demonstrate how the S-FTIR can be used for imaging plant molecular chemical structure to reveal plant structure characteristics, the following is a review of applications of the synchrotron-based technique

Imaging molecular chemistry of pioneer 39p78 corn and AC Barrie wheat

Cluster analysis in molecular chemical imaging

Conclusions