Advanced cryostat is helping the project's researchers to investigate structure-function relationships in the seeds of a wide range of species
An advanced Leica cryostat is helping the Millennium Seed Bank Project's researchers to investigate structure - function relationships in the seeds of a wide range of species.
The project is based at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew site at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, and among its main goals is the conservation of seeds from all of the UK's wild seed plant species and 10% of the world's total by 2010.
The project's seed morphologist, Wolfgang Stuppy, will be looking at the external and internal morphology of the seeds, as well as seed coat anatomy.
He hopes to uncover structural links with functional characteristics such as storability and dormancy, as well as assessing taxonomically significant seed characteristics.
A cryostat was chosen for this work, rather than a conventional microtome because of the speed factor.
Traditional paraffin embedding and sectioning are far more time consuming than using a cryostat, which is in principle a microtome inside a deep-freeze.
Instead of taking up to a week, the cryostat will deliver high quality sections in about half an hour.
With so many different species to examine, time is of the essence.
Stuppy and his colleagues evaluated a number of competitive workstations, but they particularly liked the overall build quality of the Leica CM 3050, as well as the back-up they received during their initial trials.
For example, they discovered that the cryostat's object holder is very robust and efficient, even with hard material - seed coat tissue is often as hard as bone. They found the sample chamber spacious and the whole workstation well designed and user friendly.
