But pollen is actually pretty amazing.
It’s beautiful, for a start. Seen at ultra-high magnification, pollen grains have weird and highly distinctive shapes.
But there’s much more to it than that. It can be used by crime scene investigators to help solve murders; by scientists to work out how a landscape has changed over thousands of years; and even by palaeontologists studying how the world’s rainforests changed when the dinosaurs went extinct.
Pollen might even offer a new way of delivering medicines – such as vaccinations – into the human body.
Now researchers at the University of York have teamed up with horticulturalists at RHS Harlow Carr to showcase just how amazing these tiny grains are.
A new exhibition – ‘the Wonder of Pollen’ – displayed across eight panels at Harlow Carr makes use of 3-D models and ultra-high-magnification images from scanning electron microscopy to reveal pollen’s microscopic world.
The 3-D models have been produced using a technique known as confocal laser scanning microscopy, which takes dozens of thin cross-section images through a pollen grain then uses them to reconstruct a model of its surface.
The exhibition also showcases ultra-high-magnification images from scanning electron microscopy, developed by the Society for the Promotion of Palynological Research in Austria.
Dr Oliver Wilson and Professor Robert Marchant, from the University of York, have worked with the interpretation and education teams at RHS Harlow Carr to develop the exhibition – as well as a series of workshops for primary school children.
The team behind the exhibition say that pollen is much more than a ‘pesky allergen’.
Under magnification is it beautiful – and nearly indestructible.
This makes it of huge interest to scientists, the team says.
“Pollen can shed light on stories from history and honey to hay fever and horticulture. It is critically important in our lives, the natural world, and the sciences which study it.”
Dr Wilson says pollen’s value to science comes mainly from the fact that pollen grains are so varied and distinctive – while also being incredibly tough. This means that pollen grains can survive for a very long time.
Researchers – and even forensic scientists – can use them to
- tell if a body was moved from a murder scene, by looking to see if there’s pollen on the victim’s clothes from plants not found at the site where the body was discovered
- see how a landscape has changed over thousands of years, by studying different layers of sediment from different time periods to see what pollen was around
- track the evolution and diversification of species over tens or hundreds of millions of years.
“There was even a study the other year that used pollen to help understand how tropical rainforests changed after the non-bird dinosaurs went extinct!” Dr Wilson said.
Perhaps even more amazing – from the perspective of human health, at least – pollen may one day offer a new way of delivering vaccines into the human body.
That’s because pollen grains are essentially tiny, tough-coated capsules which evolved to protect a plant’s male sperm until it can reach the right part of a female flower to cause fertilisation.
That means pollen grains are tough, Dr Wilson says – which in turn means there’s ‘a chance we can give them different cargo and targets – such as vaccines that need to pass through the stomach but be released in the intestines’.
Remember that next time you’re suffering from a pollen-induced sneezing fit.
The Wonder of Pollen exhibition runs at RHS Harlow Carr until September.
