Fig. 5

AO-incorporated subtractive imaging in pine mature pollen. a Lateral and axial sections of a Pinus pollen grain without and with AO correction. The red and black arrowheads indicate the positions of the axial section and the lateral section with respect to each other. The yellow dashed boxes indicate the positions of the structures used for aberration measurement. b Maximum intensity projection of the structures with which the aberration was measured. c Zoomed-in views of the gray boxes in (a). The yellow arrow indicates the gap between the exine and body of the pollen. d Intensity profiles along the green and blue lines in (a). e Subtracted images of the same lateral section as in (a) without and with AO correction. f Corrective wavefront. The dashed squares indicate the layout of the wavefront segments, where each wavefront segment corresponds to a unit square. An independent mask approach was used in the measurement process. g, h Zoomed-in views of the blue and white boxes in (a) and (e). The cyan arrow indicates the exine of the pollen. Images in (e), (g) and (h) are normalized to their respective peak intensities to differentiate the details revealed by the local image contrast. Scale bars, 10 μm in (a), (b), and (e) and 2 μm in (c), (g), and (h)