I want to make roots twist more vigorously; instead, I found a way to make twisting almost stop. As I have written about earlier (here and here), root twisting in my trials has been somewhat … flakey. I brought seed of six genotypes of lab weed (aka arabidopsis) that are recognized as twisting mutants. These […]

We live in polarized times: the word polarization is starting to stand in for all that ails us. But today I can write about polarization that is happy, or at least useful (Fig. 1).  One day the week before last, I left the lab, walked along the towpath beside the canal until reaching a Sainsbury’s supermarket. I […]

This past week, I vanquished the dark zone but at a cost. Readers of a previous post will remember my main struggle with the project thus far is to get the cellulose-stain, fast scarlet, to stain roots reliably. To recapitulate: Dissolving the dye in water gives lousy staining; using a pH 6 or 7 buffer […]

Yes! I have allowed myself to get distracted. But don’t worry; the rabbit hole in question is scientific. The dye, fast scarlet, does curious things to my roots. A curiosity I have already written about is the dark zone; for some reason, the stain is excluded from a relevant part of the root. I have […]