 Hello, I am Dr. Florence Danila and I am a molecular biologist and microscopist. So I'm a post-doctor fellow at the A&U or the Australian National University and my work is and I'm working for both the ARC Center of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis as well as the C4Ice project, both of which aim to improve crop performance in yield by improving photosynthesis or the way plants make food. So majority of my work involves the tiny structures in the leaf called Plasmodesmata. Plasmodesmata are, as I mentioned, tiny structures in the leaf and they facilitate transport of sugars and gases between cells. So Plasmodesmata are very tiny, so to imagine how tiny they are, I will have to analogize it with a strand of our hair. And it is actually 5,000 times smaller than a strand of our hair and therefore it needs to be imaged under a special microscope called electron microscope. So electron microscope use electron beam instead of light during imaging. And this kind of special imaging allows for far more higher magnification than a normal light microscope where we are mostly used to. So to imagine the difference between an electron microscope and a light microscope, so a light microscope can magnify an image up to below 2,000 times. But for an electron microscope it can magnify up until 10 million times what we can see with a naked eye. And for me that's very important because dealing with Plasmodesmata I need that special kind of imaging that will allow me to see the structures that I'm interested with. With a light microscope we're so used to specimen preparation such as slicing thin sections, staining and then looking at it under the microscope. But for SEM, because of its special requirements such as the use of electron beam, we also need special sample preparation. And this special sample preparation includes coating the specimen with a thin metal such as platinum and gold and this will avoid charging during the imaging process. So to show you an example of what an electron microscope can produce, so here is an image of a rice leaf under a scanning electron microscope. Where here I am showing you a junction between two cells in rice leaf and this junction is where the Plasmodesmata are normally found. And in this image you can see that the magnification is up is 66,000 times than what we can see with a naked eye. And for me that's really important because most of my work involves quantifying the structures. And for me to be able to see this clear highly resolved image is very important and here you can immediately see that we can count them easily. And for this image, these structures here which are like a target, you can see that here for instance in this image we can see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten structures. Which is really important for me because I'm working on comparison between a kind of photosynthetic types such as C3 and C4 where C4 is more photosynthetically efficient than C3. And therefore I need to compare whether in terms of communication between the cells one is higher than the other. And for my work what I found is that the C4 plants or C4 leaves which are far more efficient than C3 leaves, they have more of these communication channels between their cells. And therefore we can say that because of this increase in communication channels between the leaves it also improves the way they produce food. And indeed in terms of their yield difference C4 plants produce more food in tons per hectare than C3 plants. So an example of C4 plants would be maize and an example of C3 plants would be rice.