LabLogic Research Collaboration with University of Sheffield
Sponsorship from a local company is giving the University of Sheffield a head start in research that could lead to more productive food crops and a better understanding of how plants work.
Broomhill-based LabLogic Systems is contributing to the funding of a ground-breaking investigation by the University’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences into how plants use the many different chemical compounds they manufacture in their roots.
The company has also provided a unique piece of equipment called a Micro Imager, which builds up a live picture of what happens to individual compounds in the food stream as they travel through a plant.
“Each compound is tagged with a minute quantity of radioactivity that emits tiny flashes of light when the plant sample is put into the imager’s sample chamber. These flashes indicate the location of the tagged compounds” explains LabLogic sales manager David Johnson.
“Until now, the only way of getting such pictures has been to expose samples to photographic film and then wait for an image to develop. That can take weeks or even months and often ends in failure, but the Micro Imager gets more detailed results in just a few hours.
“Several commercial organisations in the UK are already using Micro Imagers, but so far Sheffield is one of just two universities in this country to have one – and the only one using it for work of this kind.”
LabLogic was happy to let Sheffield have the imager at much less than ‘list price’, because it wanted to find out how it would perform on plants – and early reports from the Department’s Professor Paul Quick, who is supervising the research, are very encouraging.
“After just a week we had images showing how three different compounds are taken up in leaves, which really excited us; because of the speed with which they were produced, of course, but also because of the new information they were giving us,” he said.
“I emailed some images to a colleague in the USA who is recognised as the leading expert in this field, and he was so impressed that he has sent over some special varieties of plants that he has developed.”
The Department is one of the largest of its kind in the UK and highly rated for its emphasis on studying all aspects of selected plants and animals, so there are many areas where the Micro Imager could be used. But for the moment at least it is giving its undivided attention to just two plants; the common-or-garden pea, and an even humbler plant usually classed as a weed whose exotic name of Arabidopsis gives a clue that it is more important than it looks.
Postgraduate student Daniel Kinsman, who is researching the plants for his PhD, explains why they were chosen. “The pea is an important source of protein as a food and a familiar subject for biological research – and it also happens to be an ideal size for the Micro Imager,” he says.
“Arabidopsis is equally familiar – to scientists at least – because it was the first plant whose entire genetic code they managed to read. For that reason, scientists in research labs all over the world are now using it as a ‘model’ plant on which to try out new ideas – and anything we discover here will feed into that international fund of knowledge.”
