Equipment for rapid homogenization of high numbers of plant tissue for electrophoretic analysis of proteins.

A homogenizing system was developed to process multiple samples of various plant tissues. The equipment consists of a motor-driven stainless steel homogenizer that fits perfectly into a hole of a disposable plate. Hard plant material like melon or squash seeds (maximal length of 1.4 cm) could be homogenized within 10 s by forcing the homogenizer towards the bottom of a 24- or 48-well tissue culture plate. Smaller seeds could be homogenized within 10 s in a similar way using a 96-well tissue culture plate. Leaf tissue, or other types of soft plant tissue, could be homogenized with the same equipment. For homogenization of small samples, e.g. pistils of small flowers, a 60-well Terasaki plate was used. For homogenization of several hundreds of leaf tissue samples, an apparatus was developed that contains 12 homogenizers driven simultaneously by an electromotor. A tissue culture plate containing 96 leaf samples could be handled in this way in less than 10 min. The performance of the equipment was evaluated by analyzing homogenates of several types of plant tissue by different electrophoretic techniques.