• Mcainsh, Martin Robert
• Skolik, Paul
• Martin, Francis L.

Abstract

Plants as our most renewable natural resource are indispensable within earth's biosphere, especially for food security. Providing food security in a modern world requires an ever-increasing understanding of how plants, and their products, respond to changes in the environment. In this respect, a combination of physical and chemical analytical methods can be used to study the structure and function of plants at the whole-plant, organ, tissue, cellular, and biochemical levels. Vibrational spectroscopy in biology, sometimes known as biospectroscopy, encompasses a number of techniques, among them mid-infrared and Raman spectroscopy. These techniques are well-established label-free, nondestructive, and environmentally friendly analytical methods that generate a spectral “signature” of samples using mid-infrared radiation. The resultant wavenumber spectrum containing hundreds of variables as unique as a biochemical “fingerprint” represents the biomolecules (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids) present within a sample, which may serve as spectral “biomarkers” for the discrimination of distinct as well as closely related biomaterials, for various applications. In plants, biospectroscopy has been used to characterize surface structures in intact plant tissues such as leaves and fruit, plant cuticles, and cell walls, as well as to study the effects of stress on plant species. Not only does this allow the effective discrimination and “chemoidentification” of different plant structures, varieties, and cultivars, it also permits chemical profiling of plant tissues for physiological applications such as plant health monitoring and disease detection. Technical advancements are starting to overcome the major limitations of biospectroscopy such as detection sensitivity, penetration/imaging depth, and computational analysis speed, expanding the application of biospectroscopy in the plant and crop sciences. Vibrational spectra thereby serve as a basis for localization, identification, quantification of key compounds within plants, as well as to track dynamic processes for molecular-level analytics and diagnostics. This provides development potential as sensors in automatic decision-making platforms for areas including precision farming and the food production/supply chain. In this chapter we will discuss the application of biospectroscopy to study plant and crop biology and consider the potential for advancements to make biospectroscopy a more prominent technology for fundamental plant research and applied crop science as part of solutions to agricultural challenges both now and in the future.

Topics

• surface
• compound
• biomaterials
• Raman spectroscopy
• vibrational spectroscopy