Comparison of manganese uptake and transport of maize seedlings by mini-PET camera.

Manganese is one of the most important essential micronutrients for the plants. To monitor its uptake and transport by radioactive tracking is a powerful method due to the no carrier added 52Mn in 10-12 moldm-3 concentration range. The generally used method is to measure the radioactivity of cut parts of plants by gamma-spectrometry. Only few studies reported about noninvasive measurement, using pairs of detectors connected in coincidence. We use a full ring MiniPET machine for this purpose to dynamically visualize the uptake and distribution of the radionuclide in 4D. The results are controlled with the conventional gamma spectroscopy after chopping the plants into six parts. The study of stress tolerance initiated by PEG 6000 in different hybrids of maize is also presented as possible application for the phenotyping of plants by PET camera.