TomTheChemist
New member
Every botanist who has been taught in a lab knows that the only way to really know what is going on with your plants is to take a truly close look under a microscope. It's the easiest and cheapest way to look for pests and mold. Seasoned botanists are used to laboratory-style reagents, like chloral hydrate and xylene, to help clear specimens and get better images.
A friend of mine at Rutgers just sent me a bottle of what he calls Visikol. A team at Rutgers developed Visikol as a substitute for chloral hydrate in microscopy (see here, chloral hydrate has long been used in microscopy for clearing, see wikipedia), and I always view my herbage under a scope at home. My scope doesn't have a camera, and so unfortunately I can't exactly share the stunning results, but I seriously recommend getting your hands on some if you are serious about botany. Makes using my crappy microscope a hell of a lot easier!
Anyway, here is an image of some trichomes coming from tumeric from their website, and another of the stoma and epidermal cells of some sweet basil.
Figured I'd share it here, figured someone might be interested. It's some interesting stuff, and they have some interesting resources about botany and microscopy on their website visikol.com. Hopefully I'll find someone who has a camera on their microscope soon and I can post the results!
A friend of mine at Rutgers just sent me a bottle of what he calls Visikol. A team at Rutgers developed Visikol as a substitute for chloral hydrate in microscopy (see here, chloral hydrate has long been used in microscopy for clearing, see wikipedia), and I always view my herbage under a scope at home. My scope doesn't have a camera, and so unfortunately I can't exactly share the stunning results, but I seriously recommend getting your hands on some if you are serious about botany. Makes using my crappy microscope a hell of a lot easier!
Anyway, here is an image of some trichomes coming from tumeric from their website, and another of the stoma and epidermal cells of some sweet basil.
Figured I'd share it here, figured someone might be interested. It's some interesting stuff, and they have some interesting resources about botany and microscopy on their website visikol.com. Hopefully I'll find someone who has a camera on their microscope soon and I can post the results!
