Communicating About Plant Biology Through Science-Art and Videos

Namrata Sengupta, Ph.D.
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Nathanaël Prunet, Ph.D. our Spotlight Scientist talks about the importance of plant development research, science-art with confocal imaging, and how videos help with reproducible research.

Nathanaël Prunet, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He recently published a JoVE Video Article highlighting a detailed protocol to perform confocal imaging on live, developing Arabidopsis flower buds.

JoVE caught up with Dr. Prunet to get some insight into how live confocal imaging provides plant biologists with a powerful tool to study development.

Q. Could you tell us a little bit about your overall research focus?

A. I study plant development – how plants grow and flowers form. More specifically, I look at the mechanisms underlying the patterning of flower buds and try to understand how different plant genes and hormones determine the position where floral organs (sepals, petals, stamens, and pistil) form, and define boundaries between these organs.

More than eighty percent of our food comes directly from plants, the majority of it fruits and seeds, which are parts or products of the flower. Understanding the development of flowers is critical for addressing food security questions.

 Q. What encouraged you to publish this specific technique in JoVE, and who do you think will benefit from this publication?

A. Attempting to reproduce a technique can be hard, even with a detailed written protocol, and seeing a technique performed on video can be extremely helpful. I published my research in JoVE Video Journal to ensure reproducibility of the technique.

Prior to my JoVE publicationI have been contacted about the technique by other scientists in my field. I hope that this Video Article will inspire other scientists in the flower development field to use live confocal imaging, and help get the knack of the technique.

Dr. Prunet uses live confocal imaging in his plant development research.

Q. What are some current challenges in your immediate field of research and how do you expect your research to address those?

A. A lot of published research in the field of plant development revolves around the shoot meristem –  a group of undifferentiated cells at the tip of the stem that continuously produces new leaves and flower buds. These organs emerge one at a time and are well separated both spatially and temporally as they form.

The flower bud, on the other hand, is a more “crowded” structure. It contains a meristem – the flower meristem – which produces multiple organs of four different types (sepals, petals, stamens, and pistil) simultaneously and within a limited amount of space. Therefore, patterning the floral bud is more complicated than patterning the shoot. Confocal imaging, which allows us to look at the dynamics of gene expression and hormone levels in live samples, is a very powerful tool to study development, but it has not been applied much to the study of flowers. I strongly believe that live confocal imaging will help us better understand flower development and I hope my JoVE publication will inspire more scientists in the field to use this technique.

Q. As a scientist, you have been pretty successful in promoting science through art. You have also won some Science Art (#SciArt) contests. Could you tell us a little bit about this experience?

This image was one of the winners of the 2015 Nikon Small World and FASEB BioArt competitions.

A. I am primarily a scientist, but I spend a lot of time working with microscopy and I am passionate about the artistic aspect of my research. In fact, I spend much more time on the microscope trying to get the perfect image than I would need to simply answer my initial biological questions – although high-quality images often lead to interesting and unexpected results. Of all sciences, biology has the most space for art, from observation drawings to illustration to photography and microscopy. This is one of the main reasons that drew me to biology in the first place, and what inspires me to convey scientific ideas in an artistic way.

Over the last few years, I have participated in various microscopy and SciArt contests and have won

Image of Distinction award at the 2016 Nikon Small World.

several awards. I was one of the winners of the 2015 Nikon Small World and FASEB BioArt competitions (which earned me a feature in the NIH Director’s Blogand was also a finalist in the NSF’s 2015 Visualization Challenge and the Royal Photography Society’s 2016 International Images for Science competition. My images were also featured in the Cell Picture Show.

Q. Do you think #SciArt is an effective medium for communicating science to a larger audience?

Image of distinction award at the 2013 Nikon Small World.

A. Yes, it is. The visual impact of images can have a great effect and can serve as a conversation starter with people outside your own scientific discipline. SciArt also helps to generate interest in science among the general public. Actually, images from SciArt competitions such as the Nikon Small World often end up in mainstream media, where they can spark public attention.

There is also a very dynamic community of SciArtists – both artists whose work is inspired by science and scientists passionate about the aesthetic aspect of their research – on social media. In fact, Twitter (with hashtags such as #SciArt or #BioArt) has been very helpful for me to connect with this community and reach out to the public. 

Q. As a scientist who is greatly invested in a visual basis of representing your research, what role do you think videos can play in the future of scientific research?

A. Videos are a great way to communicate, and scientists use them more and more to present their results as well as the techniques they use. In that context, JoVE has become a very useful resource for scientists who wish to reproduce techniques developed by other research groups. 

Independently of this communication aspect, biology is dynamic in nature, which makes video one of the best media to investigate biological questions. For example, the flower buds I image under the microscope are still alive, and I can observe cell divisions and changes in shape and gene expression as an individual flower buds forms, rather than just getting snapshots of flower development with still images from different buds. “Static images” often fail to convey the real development process, and videos help solve that.