Illuminating the subcellular maze: fluorescence-activated organelle sorting in plant sciences

The isolation of organelles is critical for gaining a deeper understanding of their functions in intracellular processes, not only at the cellular but also at the multicellular, organ, and organism levels. Isolating them into pure fractions allows for the reduction of sample complexity, thereby ensuring high quality downstream analysis, such as in protein localization studies. Since the mid-20th century, new methods of subcellular fractionation have constantly emerged. Conventional fractionation approaches based on (ultra)centrifugation typically focus on isolating only one type of organelle. Moreover, their resolving power may be inadequate for improving the limit of detection of downstream applications. Fluorescence-activated organelle sorting (FAOS) is a versatile and advanced technique that is gaining popularity due to its high efficiency. This efficiency refers to the ability to monitor organelle isolation live and to sort multiple organelle populations simultaneously from a single sample. This review offers an overview of the usage of FAOS and highlights its promising prospects within the realm of plant sciences. FAOS shows great potential for applications in both the functional and structural analysis of plant organelles while serving as a valuable isolation tool for downstream applications, including 'omics' studies.