Background

One of the most remarkable characteristics of filmy ferns is that the frond, apart from the vascular tissue, is made of a single cell layer and lacks stomata. In our previous work (Garcés et al. 2018), we incubated Hymenophyllum caudiculatum fronds with cycloheximide or actinomycin D to study the effects of translation, or transcription inhibition respectively. If an exogen inhibitor incubated with a filmy fern frond does not affect plant physiology, it may be because the inhibitor fails to enter the cell. In order to improve the entrance of inhibitors into the cell, we tested if an aqueous solution of 0.1% DMSO has effects on cell membrane permeability, visualizing the entrance of propidium iodide (PI) into the cells.