IMAGE ANALYZER USED FOR DATA ACQUISITION IN PHOTOTROPISM STUDIES

Abstract— Equipment (video system and goniometric device) developed for the automatic acquisition of data, which can generally be used for testing movement responses of small organisms is presented. This relatively cheap setup, especially designed for kinetic testing of phycomyces phototropism, could also be used with very slight modifications to study phototropism in higher plants and even for other purposes in the study of cell and organism movements. It permits continuous automatic observation of bending angle as a function of time. The goniometric device permits a complete geometrical localization of the object to be analyzed, even time-dependent if needed. The video-system hardware consists of a CCD-video camera (with a sensitivity maximum between 700 and 800 nm), light source (equipped with an IR-filter), video monitor, video card (for image digitalization), video recorder, computer and computer interface. The last assures (through a parallel port of the computer) complete control of the setup; time coordination between computer, lamp, camera and video recorder is thus ensured. Both real time processing and analysis of previously recorded data can be performed. The system permits automatic observation of experiments over long time periods and provides a large amount of data assuring good statistics, which can be analysed quickly.