Precision thin sectioning of silica phytoliths by Focused Ion Beam (FIB-SEM) v1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phytoliths are microbodies of biogenic silica made by many plant species in all ecosystems over the globe. They serve critical functions in alleviating plant stresses and influencing the carbon and silicon biogeochemical cycles. The investigation of carbon occlusion within phytolith, as a potential source of long-term soil carbon storage, has long been hampered by a lack of direct experimental evidence. In this protocol, we employed a Focused Ion Beam coupled to a Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) to produce thin lamellas (approximately 15 × 10 µm2 size, with thickness below 200 nm) enabling synchrotron scanning transmission X-ray microspectroscopy (STXM) analysis with ≈100–200 nm pixel size resolution at energies near the silicon and carbon K-absorption edges. Our results revealed the spatial distributions of carbon within phytoliths, highlighting its presence at lamella borders, within islands, and dispersed in extended regions. This protocol of phytolith slicing into thin lamella provides unprecedented insights into the spatial and chemical characteristics of carbon within phytoliths, offering a low-invasive alternative to wet-chemical digestion methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".