Pollen microscopy

[nanocastro]

Hi all
Just recently I’ve been collaborating with a group of people from Argentina that is working on melissopalynology (study of pollen in honey)
In order to understand wich pollen is present in honey you need to identify it first from the flower so we did a brief exercise to look at pollen from local flowers with an OFM (RPi camera - 40x lens)

Here you can find a brief guide on how to look at pollen from flowers directly

And here you can find some previous discussion about pollen monitoring

Pollen monitoring

The intended travel of the delta stage is similar, i.e. about 12mm laterally. However, making it taller should increase travel proportionally. 22mm might be pushing it, but 15 or 18mm might be possible - given that you can never really hit the edge of the coverslip (allowing for glue etc.) that might just be enough?

Does anyone know any open palynological database?

[Pelle]

Really nice work @nanocastro, and thanks for sharing a brief on how to look at pollen!

[biodotpe]

Hi Nano, here is a database: PalDat. It is a public database of pollen and stores pictures from more than 2500 plant species. This open-access repository is curated by professionals before their publications. In addition, these datasets are endorsed and used by the scientific community: PalDat 3.0 – second revision of the database, including a free online publication tool.

I used their pictures to replicate an ImageJ pipeline for pollen grain counting from a publication: