science

I crossed a plant that expresses green fluorescent protein with one of my plants that expresses red fluorescent protein. The green fluorescent protein should be in the cytoplasm, and the red fluorescent protein should be in the cell walls, so I will be able to do some fancy microscopy to show a red cell outline filled in with green. For now, though, I can image the whole plant with a fluorescence dissecting microscope, and do a little dance in my seat in the microscope room because it totally worked!

First, the bright field, so you can see there are two plants there:

Then the red fluorescent protein: both plants express it. 

Then the green fluorescent protein: only the bottom plant expresses it. This means that the plant I used for making the crosses only had one copy of the green fluorescent protein gene, so half of the resulting offspring are green and half are not. This is very convenient for confirming that the green fluorescence is genuine and not due to excitement of chlorophyll, for example.

I took these pictures by holding our lab's digital camera up to the eyepiece of the microscope. Pretty low-tech, but it's good enough for me! These plants are the result of the first crosses I ever made in Arabidopsis, which has flowers smaller than the end of a Q-tip. To make the cross, you have to take a flower from one parent and remove all the anthers with their pollen. Then you have to take an anther from the other parent and dust it on the stigma of the first parent. All this is done under a dissecting microscope because the parts are so small! It is not my favorite thing to do, but since I am apparently capable of doing it successfully, it is not my least favorite thing either. That would be cloning....