Wednesday, November 15, 2006
251-10

Method for creating stomatal impressions directly onto archivable microscope slides.

Dennis Gitz, USDA-ARS, 3810 Fourth St., Lubbock, TX 79415-3397, United States of America

Stomatal density has been shown to be a primary determinant of water use efficiency, limitation to CO2 assimilation rate and yield. Widely used methods of stomatal impressioning sample small regions of the leaf, are labor intensive, or do not yield stable archivable samples for potentially revisiting datasets. We describe methods of producing such impressions which yield samples large enough to perform stomatal density mapping across entire leaf surfaces.