A totally failure generated in its wake something of interest nonetheless ....
I had carefully prepared a leaf section of Water Plantain Alisma plantago-aquatica to do a photomacrograph of the smut fungus Doassansia alismatis, which can be guessed from its name to target exclusively Alisma. I stained with Acridine Orange dye that should give some nice UV-induced fluorescence (UVIVF). So far so good.
The scene was captured with the Mitutoyo 10x/0.28 objective (infinity corrected, photographers would think of this as 21mm f/17 lens) on the Z7, using a Convoy UV-LED for illumination. I set up my Stackshot 3 rail for high resolution and shot 120 frames. All well, except i had forgot the backlash calibration of the macro rail, which was set 223 µm off. Thus my attempt of documenting the spore balls of this smut was a total failure as focus was off by a wide margin. Looking through the stack frames later, however, I found a few that had captured just a tiny part of the scene in tolerable focus (not the part of interest, though). I enlarged that small part of the frame using Topaz Gigapixel AI, and here it is. You can see the cell walls, cell nuclei some in meiosis (blue), stomata (those large cells looking a bit like female private parts), and the occasional dusting of spores (yellow). The dark stomata have already been invaded by the smut, but in an early stage as the local infection there had not developed into spore balls.
Thus a failure with visual benefits, after all.
Alien smut landscape
