Plant Microinjection Techniques

Abstract

The microinjection of plant cells was first described early this century in reports of a series of experiments on the effect of injecting various microorganisms and chemicals into the cells of Nitella, Vaucheria and Spirogyra (1,2). Earlier reports had described the microdissection of animal cells (3,4), but these were the first experiments on the injection of material into living cells. The glass injection pipettes were pulled by hand in a microburner flame and positioned with a crude, screw-driven manipulator clamped to the stage of a simple compound microscope (1). Despite the primitive equipment many cells survived the manipulations and the fates of the cells and the injected material were studied up to 10 days post-injection (2). Although these pioneering experiments were conducted on plant cells, the subsequent development of microinjection and micromanipulation techniques has taken place almost exclusively in animal cell systems, where cell biologists quickly developed methods for dissecting subcellular components from living cells (5,6) and transplanting nuclei and portions of cytoplasm between amoebae (7–10) and amphibian egg cells (11–14). Interestingly, these developments were concerned with microdissection and transplantation and little work appears to have been done on cell injection between the original reports and the comparatively recent developments in animal and plant microinjection.