Using Dynamic Laser Speckle Imaging for Plant Breeding: A Case Study of Water Stress in Sunflowers

Abstract

This study focuses on the promising use of biospeckle technology to detect water stress in plants, a complex physiological mechanism. This involves monitoring the temporal activity of biospeckle pattern to study the occurrence of stress within the leaf. The effects of water stress in plants can involve physical and biochemical changes. Some of these changes may alter the optical scattering properties of leaves. The present study therefore proposes to test the potential of a biospeckle measurement to observe the temporal evolution in different varieties of sunflower plants under water stress. An experiment applying controlled water stress with osmotic shock using polyethylene glycol 6000 (PEG) was conducted on two sunflower varieties: one sensitive, and the other more tolerant to water stress. Temporal monitoring of biospeckle activity in these plants was performed using the average value of difference (AVD) indicator. Results indicate that AVD highlights the difference in biospeckle activity between day and night, with lower activity at night for both varieties. The addition of PEG entailed a gradual decrease in values throughout the experiment, particularly for the sensitive variety. The results obtained are consistent with the behaviour of the varieties submitted to water stress. Indeed, a few days after the introduction of PEG, a stronger decrease in AVD indicator values was observed for the sensitive variety than for the resistant variety. This study highlights the dynamics of biospeckle activity for different sunflower varieties undergoing water stress and can be considered as a promising phenotyping tool.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の水ストレス状態をレーザースペックルのAVD指標で測定し、品種間差を評価するセンサー型フェノタイピング手法の適用が中心である。

Code and data availability

The article describes biospeckle imaging of sunflowers under water stress, but contains no authors' data deposit, no public dataset of the biospeckle images/AVD measurements, and no author-released analysis code. The only tool mentioned, the Bio-Speckle Laser Tool Library (BSLTL), is a pre-existing third-party generic,

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.