Branched Stellate Hair of Leaf Epidermis (w.m) under the Microscope🔬

Today’s pre-prepared slide is ‘Branched Stellate Hair of Leaf Epidermis (w.m)’. ‘Stellate’ meaning star-shaped, ‘epidermis’ meaning outer surface layer and ‘w.m’ meaning wet mount. So in other words, hair on a leaf that is star shaped/branching close up.

Plant trichomes are fine epidermal outgrowths that have diverse structure and function. Often they are used for protection. Examples are hairs, glandular hairs, scales, and papillae. A common type of trichome is a hair. Plant hairs may be unicellular or multicellular, branched or unbranched. Multicellular hairs may have one or several layers of cells. Branched hairs can be dendritic (tree-like), tufted, or stellate (star-shaped) such as in the hibiscus plant. Source

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I would not have thought about looking at fine hair on plants unless it was odd looking. Honestly I didn’t think there were that many different shapes and structures. Oh my goodness, I just realised something. We’ve seen trichrome before on one of our homemade specimen. Remember the sepal of the basil flower we checked out under the microscope? We saw those alien looking trees along the edge of the sepal.

Here is the picture of it. What do you think? Would you say that is what it is?

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Ok back to our sample. Let us check it out under the microscope.

They do appear star like shaped and really branched out. Something caught my eye though. Many of them seemed transparent; however this particular one being focused on has something inside it. I am not sure what it is, it almost looks like it has something similar to bone that allows it to move the end?? No idea.

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Here I’ve adjusted the iris diaphragm and we can see how branch out the hair really is. I still have no idea what the darker parts are. But it looks like a ball in the middle with a long cone part attached to it….. no idea. Do you know what it is?

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_{All images and gifs belong to @supersoju
Plant leaf trichome
Leaf Trichomes
Trichome}