Some time ago I mentioned to my partner that I've always wanted a microscope as a hobby ๐ฌ they saved some money and got a cheap one for me recently, and I'm having so much fun!
Pictured is the thin peel that's intimate with the garlic clove, stained with eosin (I think) and magnified x1200. It's great because it's already 1 cell thick ๐ค
What are some tips you guys have for a beginner? I'm looking into buying methylene blue for staining too.
nice cell walls! i took a class in grad school for plant disease identification, which was more of a whirlwind tour than exhaustive. there's a lot to know for a specialist, and i'm more of a flex player in the plant sciences. i know enough that if i absolutely had to and had such equipment and some compendia at hand alongside some basic info about the plant (where it came from, what it is), i could probably make a really respectable guess.
anyway, as much as i didn't care for staring into microscopes for long durations, it was pretty cool to see life at that level. and if you want to play CSI for plant diseases, get yourself some diseased/disordered tissues. they're all over the place in the built environment if you look close and find those odd leaves that have something going on...chlorosis, necrosis, wilting, curling. not dead or completely fucked tissue, but some where you can look at the boundairy between healthy and fucked tissue, the places where the plant is trying to compartmentalize the problem and the pathogen is trying to keep moving. full disease/disorder identification is hard, but you can see neat structures, especially if it's fungal since their lifecycles/survival structures/spores are bananatown.
That's a great idea, thanks!
for sure! and just so you don't get frustrated trying to find a culprit, abiotic disorders (nutrient deficiencies, pesticide drift, etc) are notoriously difficult to diagnose under the scope unless you have a great context/history for the plant and location.
this probably isn't going to come up for you, but I remember being super frustrated looking for something for an hour that wasn't there and then the professor was like "lol it's pesticide drift, remember this moment".
also, the thing somebody said about puddle water is a great one. I had a class where they rigged up a camera feed to a sample of basically gut water from a ruminant (microbial digestion) and the entire slide was like a city of little zoomers and big behemoths all maneuvering around and collectively breaking down plant cells & interacting with each other. it was like TV. I could have watched that for hours. I am sure puddle water and other biologically active water is similar.