Imaging is a critical aspect of understanding plant growth and development, particularly for meristems, grafts, and inflorescence structures that produce economically important products such as grains, seeds, flowers, and fruits. Imaging root-soil-microbe interactions is also valuable but problematic as these events occur underground, and most efforts to visualize this environment necessitate disruption of the very systems we want to study. Capturing detailed 3D image data of intact delicate structures and complicated environments is difficult for conventional microscopy as samples must be very small or thin or both for high resolution imaging. Lab-based X-ray tomography (XRT) in general and X-ray microscopy (XRM) specifically bridge this imaging gap by providing multiscale high-resolution 3D tomographic data where cell-level volumes can be situated within the context of the whole tissue, organ, or plant. Correlative imaging is also significantly enhanced by using XRM scan data of whole resin-embedded samples as a road map to guide subsequent nanometer-scale volume electron microscopy (vEM). Lab-based X-ray facilities can be used for imaging methods development to leverage proposals to use difficult-to-access synchrotron facilities, and encourage wider application of X-ray imaging in all of life science. Numerous examples of X-ray imaging of a range of scientifically and economically important plants will be presented.
