I spent the last six months getting my protocol to work. It's not that it's incredibly difficult or complicated, it's just that no one, in all those articles I read, included how to do the flow cytometry analysis in detail. Turns out there are some tweaks to doing flow cytometry on plant nuclei that's just not intuitive when you've never done it before (I'll get back to that later).
We didn't get it right until I stumbled upon a so-called white paper by Galbraith that describes everything to the last detail. Very well, at least the flow cytometer analysis works and I'm able to visualize the nuclei. But so far, none of my treatments have shown anything (except for the one where I seems to have killed the plants, but that wasn't really useful!). I KNOW it's not supposed to work yet, as I've only done it a couple of times and tested very few treatment regimes. But after spending half a year getting the analysis to work at all, it would have been kind of...nice, to just get an indication that I'm on the track of something.
Well, that's what everyone tells you about science - you need to try for ages and ages.
So, it's time to role up the sleeves and get to work. Next run is tomorrow, my plants have been treated for 48 hours. Maybe that'll do something...
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