The traditional plant culture system is not suitable for aquatic and tiny plants, such as Wolffia, because of its characteristics of disconnecting and floating. To track the developmental process of every Wolffia plantlet, we designated a millifluidic chip for plantlet culture and connected a persistent pump to control the speed of liquid medium (picture A). Even so, the microscope and other observation equipment were separated from the plant incubator that led to many inconveniences. For example, shaking would cause the plantlet to drift out of channel when chip was transferred from incubator to microscope, or the temperature difference between inside and outside the incubator would cause the petri cover to fog up, and make it impossible to observe. In order to solve these problems, students of RDFZ designed the plant-on-chip system (B-E). We integrated the incubator, microscope and camera into one toolbox. All the original parts of the Plant-on-Chip (PoC) system were ordered online.

Click here to download the Wolffia australiana culture system instruction.