About the Seminar:

Climate change and human activity have made biotic and abiotic plant stressors more common which leads to billions of dollars lost each year as crop yields decline. Fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging have been used over the past few decades that aid in identifying when plants are stressed but these methods provide little information on what is occurring within stressed plants on the cellular level. Fluorescence lifetime is an alternative measurement that yields information about changes in plant fluorophore environment and can be a comprehensive, quantitative approach to understanding plant stress. Fluorescence lifetime coupled with microscopy, also known as fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), can compare fluorophore environments between different plant cells. Recently, Lei et al. were the first to report FLIM to quantify the extent of stress-related damage in virus infected plant cells. Their results indicate heterogeneity in intracellular and intercellular fluorophore environment for healthy and virus infected plant cells. The implications of these results and FLIM’s potential to be used in the study of plant stress will be discussed in this talk.