University of Queensland, School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, St. Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia.
Dartmouth College, Department of Biological Sciences, Life Science Center, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755.
Plant Physiol. 2018 Oct;178(2):507-523. doi: 10.1104/pp.18.00759. Epub 2018 Aug 14.
Understanding the distribution of elements within plant tissues is important across a range of fields in plant science. In this review, we examine synchrotron-based x-ray fluorescence microscopy (XFM) as an elemental imaging technique in plant sciences, considering both its historical and current uses as well as discussing emerging approaches. XFM offers several unique capabilities of interest to plant scientists, including in vivo analyses at room temperature and pressure, good detection limits (approximately 1-100 mg kg), and excellent resolution (down to 50 nm). This has permitted its use in a range of studies, including for functional characterization in molecular biology, examining the distribution of nutrients in food products, understanding the movement of foliar fertilizers, investigating the behavior of engineered nanoparticles, elucidating the toxic effects of metal(loid)s in agronomic plant species, and studying the unique properties of hyperaccumulating plants. We anticipate that continuing technological advances at XFM beamlines also will provide new opportunities moving into the future, such as for high-throughput screening in molecular biology, the use of exotic metal tags for protein localization, and enabling time-resolved, in vivo analyses of living plants. By examining current and potential future applications, we hope to encourage further XFM studies in plant sciences by highlighting the versatility of this approach.
了解植物组织内元素的分布在植物科学的多个领域都很重要。在这篇综述中，我们考察了基于同步加速器的 X 射线荧光显微镜（XFM）作为一种植物科学中的元素成像技术，既考虑了其历史和当前的用途，也讨论了新兴的方法。XFM 为植物科学家提供了一些独特的功能，包括在室温常压下进行活体分析、良好的检测极限（约为 1-100mg/kg）和出色的分辨率（低至 50nm）。这使其能够应用于一系列研究中，包括在分子生物学中进行功能表征、研究食品中营养物质的分布、了解叶面肥料的移动、研究工程纳米粒子的行为、阐明金属（类）在农业植物物种中的毒性效应以及研究超积累植物的独特性质。我们预计，XFM 光束线上的持续技术进步也将为未来提供新的机会，例如在分子生物学中进行高通量筛选、使用奇特的金属标签进行蛋白质定位，以及实现对活体植物进行时间分辨的、体内分析。通过考察当前和潜在的未来应用，我们希望通过突出这种方法的多功能性，鼓励在植物科学中进一步开展 XFM 研究。
