Meeting Abstract
For phytophagous insects, life on plants poses three fundamental challenges: nutrition, exposure, and attachment. Of these three challenges, the adaptations required for attachment and locomotion on plants is poorly studied, especially regarding the plant surfaces that these insects commonly encounter. Plants adapt to protect against these insects with structures that include spines, trichomes, glandular structures, surface waxes, and more. Descriptions of these plant surface characteristics are fairly common; however, quantitative measurements of plant surfaces are largely lacking and are often complicated to obtain. Measuring plant surfaces often requires labor-intensive imaging techniques such as cryo-SEM. For this study, we wanted to test if we could get a detailed surface topography for plants using a 3D profilometry technique called gel-based profilometry (GelSight, Inc). To address this question, we imaged sixteen plants species with the gel-based profilometry, using two different individuals per species and imaging the adaxial and abaxial surface of each leaf sample. Also, if numerous trichomes were present on the plant surface when first imaged, a second scan was taken with trichomes shaved off. This gave a more accurate surface profile for roughness measurements. All roughness measurements were generated using MountainsMap topography software. Overall, this simpler profilometry technique allowed us to achieve detailed measurements, and our initial results demonstrate small differences in the average surface roughness of these plant species. These variations, even those measuring a few micrometers, can make a significant difference in a small insect’s ability to properly attach and locomote.
