Key methodological features of tubulin cytoskeleton studies in nodules of legume plants

The discovery of microtubules in plants, as well as their subsequent study, was made possible by the methods of electron microscopy. Further, methods for visualizing the cytoskeleton in a plant cell were actively developed using immunolocalization combined with laser scanning confocal microscopy (K. Celler et al., 2016). All the above-listed methods involve the fixation of the analyzed biological material. It should be noted that the tubulin cytoskeleton is an extremely dynamic structure; therefore, techniques of microtubule visualization in living plant cells using fluorescent proteins have been actively developed in recent years (K. Celler et al., 2016). Nevertheless, immunohistochemical analysis is still an essential method (J. Dyachok et al., 2016). First of all, this is due to the fact that in vivo observations are limited to plant cells of the surface layers (root hairs, epidermis) (F.M. Perrine-Walker et al., 2014; J. Dyachok et al., 2016). Moreover, for many plant species, the size of their organs is much larger than that of Arabidopsis thaliana, which makes it impossible to analyze changes in the organization of the cytoskeleton in vivo (J...