Exploring the frontiers of plant health: Harnessing NIR fluorescence and surface-enhanced Raman scattering modalities for innovative detection

Abstract

Plants play a crucial role in maintaining ecological balance and biodiversity. However, plant health is easily affected by environmental stresses. Hence, the rapid and precise monitoring of plant health is crucial for global food security and ecological balance. Currently, traditional detection strategies for monitoring plant health mainly rely on expensive equipment and complex operational procedures, which limit their widespread application. Fortunately, near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) techniques have been recently highlighted in plants. NIR fluorescence imaging holds the advantages of being non-invasive, high-resolution and real-time, which is suitable for rapid screening in large-scale scenarios. While SERS enables highly sensitive and specific detection of trace chemical substances within plant tissues. Therefore, the complementarity of NIR fluorescence and SERS modalities can provide more comprehensive and accurate information for plant disease diagnosis and growth status monitoring. This article summarizes these two modalities in plant applications, and discusses the advantages of multimodal NIR fluorescence/SERS for a better understanding of a plant's response to stress, thereby improving the accuracy and sensitivity of detection.