Correlative Flourescence - Brillouin Scattering Imaging of Plants

We present results from correlative fluorescence emission - Brillouin scattering imaging of growing plant cells (Common Onion and Arabidopsis) with micron scale spatial resolution.
Our measurements allow us to all-optically obtain 3d viscoelasticity maps of cells and correlate these with the abundance of fluorescently labeled constituents or structures. We can thereby cleanly dissect the elastic properties of different cellular sub-compartments and quantitatively correlate the presence of labelled molecular constituents with the high-frequency viscoelasticity.
We find several non-intuitive features including a turgor-pressure dependent increased viscoelasticity of the cytoplasm in the vicinity extracellular matrix, as well as a significant anisotropy in the bulk elastic modulus of the extracellular matrix that is dependent on the orientation of cells relative to the growth direction.