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Wolffiapond
But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sort of ……

—— Charles Darwin, 1871
  Morphology of W. australiana by Anatomical Lens

Wolffia is the aquatic, the simplest and the smallest angiosperm in the world. The body of Wolffia consists of only one leaf and a few buds wrapped by the leaf (picture 1-2). Under normal conditions, Wolffia is doing vegetative growth without sexual reproduction. In our lab environment, many chemical reagents could induce W. australiana flowering (EDTA, GA3, SA, 6-BA). The 6-BA is the best one (picture3) . One mall hole was shown in the "deck" of the boat-like leaf (picture 4), it was the first sign of flowering, then one stamen and one gynoecium reached out (picture 5-6). Also, there was a bubble covering the stigma at an early stage, and it would exploded later (picture 7-8). Gynoecium had grown as big as whole plantlet at late stage (picture 9-10), however, we have not got seed yet.


  Morphology of W. australiana by Scanning Electron Microscope(SEM)

SEM pictures showed overall appearance (picture1) of W. Australiana and primordium (picture 2), stomata (picture 3) and the petiole in the hole (after plantlet abscised) (picture 4). Some details of flowered W. Australiana were shown in picture 5-7.


  Morphology of W. australiana by Transmission Electron Microscope(TEM)

In the TEM pictures of the W. Australiana, several branches could be observed. The plantlets stood in a line from big to small, which suggested that the branched plantlets are initiated sequentially(fig.1-5). Partial enlarged view of the small branches are shown in fig.4,5,7, and continuous cell cluster of the smallest ones may be the place primordium initiated. In some big primordium, a crack can be observed (Fig. 6), where will be new primordium of the branched plantlet initiated. Primordium of the pistil and stamen could be also found next to the branch(fig.7,8), which indicated that they all originate from the same cells.


  Morphology of W. australiana by MicroCT

MicroCT is a good method to analyze the morphology of W. australiana by. all the videos of the W. australiana by are shown here, and We classified all videos according to whether pistils and stamens or branches were observed. The pictures of the fig 1 in ‘The Plant-on-Chip: a new horizon to the hidden core of plant morphogenesis’ were from these videos. Specifically, fig.1I-M were from video 34, fig.1N-P were from video 4, fig.11 were from video 2, the video number are simply counted from top to bottom, from left to right.

FloweringWith BranchVideo
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