Plant Tracer: A Program to Track and Quantify Plant Movement from Cellphone Captured Time-Lapse Movies

Despite the fundamental importance of plants to our very survival, student interest in plant biology is in decline as technology draws us further away from nature. Here we introduce "Plant Tracer" (http://www.planttracer.com), a Matlab-based program, which can quantify time-lapse videos of...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inBioscene (Association of College and University Biology Educators) Vol. 45; no. 3; pp. 14 - 21
Main Authors Guercio, Angelica M, Mao, Yixiang, Carvalho, Victor N. D, Zhang, Jiazhen, Li, Changyuan, Ren, Zheng, Zhao, Winnie, Wang, Yao, Brenner, Eric D
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Association of College and Biology Educators 01.12.2019
Subjects
Computer Software
Handheld Devices
Motion
Photography
Plants (Botany)
Science Laboratories
Telecommunications
Time
Video Technology
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Despite the fundamental importance of plants to our very survival, student interest in plant biology is in decline as technology draws us further away from nature. Here we introduce "Plant Tracer" (http://www.planttracer.com), a Matlab-based program, which can quantify time-lapse videos of plant movement. We demonstrate that Plant Tracer can be used to distinguish altered movement qualities in the inflorescence (flowering) stem in the Arabidopsis "pgm-1" (phosphoglucomutase) mutant when compared to wildtype, providing a genetic platform for students to evaluate how plants sense and respond to gravity and circumnutation (the back-and-forth swaying of plant organs). We show that both gravitropism and circumnutation is diminished in the "pgm-1" mutant when compared to wildtype. In this way, "Plant Tracer" is a promising instructional tool for biology labs to quantify the genetics of plant movement using smartphones.
ISSN:1539-2422