부산대학교 도서관

Lay description Cell theory has officially reached 350 years of age as the first use of the word 'cell' in a biological context can be traced to a description of plant material by Robert Hooke in his historic publication 'Micrographia: or some physiological definitions of minute bodies'. The 2015 Royal Microscopical Society Botanical Microscopy meeting was a celebration of the streams of investigation initiated by Hooke to understand at the sub-cellular scale how plant cell function and form arises. Hooke identified the polar-nature of plant cells by noting that their appearance was different depending on the angle at which the cork was cut. Each cell has a controlled shape that interlocks with its neighbours. How does this occur? Much of the work presented during the meeting described advances made in understanding how the dynamics of cellular components contribute to this process. The Honorary Fellowships awarded to Professors Chris Hawes, Peter Hepler and David Ehrhardt helped highlight the importance of quantitative microscopy; the measurement of feature and behaviours in micrographs. Over the past decade there have been significant advances in the application of computer algorithms to extract quantities from images and these have had a large impact upon botanical microscopy. The field of computer science has developed methods to recognise and track objects that have biological meaning. Botanists have benefitted enormously from cross-disciplinary interactions with computer scientists and statisticians to develop fully-formed software packages that are tailored for plant science. Critically, this software can (for the most part) be used on desktop personal computers. Moreover the majority of software is available free of charge to the academic and general public alike. In this review we provide a guide for the uninitiated to find powerful but easy-to-use software solutions for botanical light microscopy. This is accompanied by an overview of the principles driving the object-based imaging revolution and more technical descriptions of the algorithms at the heart of some of these packages. We also discuss the oft-neglected issue of measuring the performance of algorithms and the exciting possibilities offered by biosensors and label-free imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]