Zea Seed & Stem under the Microscope 🔬

There are different types of Zea species, one of which is corn or maize. I have no idea which samples I have here but they are marked as Zea.

Zea is a genus of flowering plants in the grass family. The best-known species is Z. mays (variously called maize, corn, or Indian corn), one of the most important crops for human societies throughout much of the world. Source

So in order words, a bunch of species which are closely related can be group together in a genus under the name Zea. Of which is from a particular family and so on.

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Remember our post on how to determine the difference between a monocotyledon & dicotyledon of flowering plants? Here is a quick refresher:

Monocotyledon	Dicotyledon
Stem: Vascular bundle scattered throughout	Stem: Vascular bundle located at periphery of stem
Root: Vascular bundle arranged in circle towards middle of root	Root: Vascular bundle located in centre, xylem forms a star or cross shape. Phloem found around cross.

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Let us apply what we learnt to the Zea stem cross section sample we have here.
Oh we can see the vascular bundle here are scattered throughout the stem cross section. This means this same is a monocotyledon. Close up the vascular bundle has a little bit of a different shape, but otherwise very similar to those we have seen to date. It still looks like a cool skull.

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Ok something we haven’t checked to date, a longitudinal section of the stem. So just quickly to explain, imagine holding a stem upright. A long section is cutting a section going up and down, whereas a cross section goes left to right to create the section. See how majority of the pink stain is on the sides with a few in between. Those are the phloem stained pink that we see scattered around in the cross section.

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Ok time to check out the Zea seed. The seed is actually a little big, so we could not get a microscopic shot of the whole seed. Here is a picture of the slide instead. It is about 1cm long.

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Checking out the seed we can see many different structures/cell types. Considering it is a seed, we do expect to see many cells compacted. A seed contains food source (in the form of starch) to give the seedling a head start to life so it may plant its roots and begin to grow so it may make its own food. Let us have closer look.

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The darker dots are the nucleus.

Here we can see the edge stained dark pink is the coat of the seed. It is much darker along the bottom parts because it is compacted. Whereas when we check the coat on the upper half, they seem to be lighter in colour and more spread out.

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_{All images and gifs belong to @supersoju}

References:
Zea(plant)
Genus
Parts of the seed