Lab-on-a-Chip for Studying Growing Pollen Tubes - Plant Cell Morphogenesis: Methods and Protocols - page 233

Fig. 3 Mechanical obstacle test. ( a ) Initial pollen grain distribution (image is stitched
from several high-magnifi cation micrographs. Scale bar = 1 mm. ( b ) Pollen tubes
colliding with fl at wall oriented at 60°, 30°, and 0° relative to the growth direction.
Scale bars = 100 μ m. ( c ) Time-lapse sequence of a type 0° collision. Scale

bars = 25 μ m. Reproduced from [ 11 ] with permission from IOP Publishing Limited

7. Leave the pollen tubes to grow. Camellia pollen tubes usually
germinate after 30 min imbibition in growth medium, elon-
gate at average growth rates of 12

m/min, and easily attain
more than 1 mm in total length after 2 h. Figure 3b, c shows
pollen tubes encountering mechanical obstacles at defi ned
angles [ 11 ].

μ

4 Notes

1. The current design is drawn in AutoCAD, but any CAD soft-
ware can be used as long as the output format is compatible
with the photomask creation process.
2. The current design uses COMSOL multiphysics, a fi nite ele-
ment analysis (FEA) solver of partial differential equations for
various coupled phenomena.
3. Although a class 1000 cleanroom or better (maximum of
1,000 particles of size of 0.5 μ m or larger in a cubic foot of air)