How it's Like to Perform Agroinfiltration?

Agroinfiltration Firsthand

              In an earlier post, I have talked about what is agroinfiltration and how it is used in today's pharmaceutical companies to develop antibodies. After yesterday's lab day, I have finally performed agroinfiltration for the first time. Frankly, the entire process wasn't really difficult to perform but rather repetitive. All of the supplies I needed were a needle, a 10 mL syringe, several trays holding the plants, and a 100mL beaker filled with some medium solution. The medium solution looked clear and viscous, and luckily the solution wasn't harmful to the skin, because even with wearing laboratory gloves some media spilled on my skin. The quick solution to this occasion was to wash my skin with water, so like I said before the solution is safe. In the medium solution stores bundles of key nutrients that the plants need to grow and the Agrobacterium that hopefully will deliver the needed instructions for the plants to produce the desired antibodies. I used the syringe to pull out the solution from the beaker and with a needle I poked a small incision on the leaves' undersides. As you can see from the picture, next I placed my index finger on the top portion of the leaf and placed my syringe on the incision that I made from the needle, so that none of the medium flows out of the leaf. This process continues repeatedly until the leaf is completely filled with the medium, where as you notice this will end when the dark patch is spread all around the entire leaf.

Here is a picture of a scientist performing agroinfiltration by injecting medium inside the leaf.
Notice how the solution spreads throughout the leaf as shown by the dark patch.

              Like I said in my previous post agroinfiltration is an elaborate technique to  "convince" a plant's machinery to produce antibodies whose codons were delivered from another bacterial species. This technique is very simple yet can be missing when you are doing this for the very first time. Trust me I struggled a lot with making a small incision with the needle, because I would place too much pressure and end up poking a hole through the leaf. Other than that this method is very simple but can take a long time depending on how many plants you have to infiltrate. In my session, I had around 60 plants to infiltrate and that took about 2 hours for me to do with a lab partner, so this process is pretty long but repetitive. If anyone decides to perform this procedure, just remember to bring some headphones because this whole process can take a long time.