Research facilities

Meise Botanic Garden has a high-quality infrastructure to support its research, including herbarium digitization equipment, microscopes and a fully equipped molecular lab. This research infrastructure is supported by an excellent technical and computing staff.

A dedicated team of botanical illustrators collaborates with our researchers to illustrate plant biodiversity.

Molecular laboratory

The molecular laboratory is well-equipped to accommodate most common molecular techniques. This research infrastructure is supported by an excellent technical. 

The laboratory is equipped to perform all the preparatory lab work for sequencing, including quality control of all our DNA samples. The sequencing itself is outsourced. Our lab operates a fragment analyzer, nanodrop, Qbit and qPCR. We also have other common lab equipment, including centrifuges, thermocyclers, and incubators.

Microscopical imaging

We use several microscopic techniques, including light microscopy, electron microscopy and digital microscopy. We operate a field emission scanning electron microscope (JEOL JSM7100F) to obtain detailed images with magnifications from 25 to 100 000x. Meise Botanic Garden also has a digital microscope (Keyence VHX5000) capable of automatically stacking and stitching high resolution images from medium sized objects (0,1-3cm). This equipment improves the workflow in digitizing tiny herbarium specimens and allows to perform precise measurements on 3D objects without the need for preparing slides.