Adsorbent-SERS Technique for Determination of Plant VOCs from Live Cotton Plants and Dried Teas

Abstract

We developed a novel substrate for the collection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from either living or dried plant material to be analyzed by surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). We demonstrated that this substrate can be utilized to differentiate emissions from blends of three teas, and to differentiate emissions from healthy cotton plants versus caterpillar-infested cotton plants. The substrate we developed can adsorb VOCs in static headspace sampling environments, and VOCs naturally evaporated from three standards were successfully identified by our SERS substrate, showing its ability to differentiate three VOCs and to detect quantitative differences according to collection times. In addition, volatile profiles from plant materials that were either qualitatively different among three teas or quantitatively different in abundance between healthy and infested cotton plants were confirmed by collections on Super-Q resin for dynamic headspace and solid-phase microextraction for static headspace sampling, respectively, followed by gas chromatography to mass spectrometry. Our results indicate that both qualitative and quantitative differences can also be detected by our SERS substrate although we find that the detection of quantitative differences could be improved.

Plant phenotyping relevance

生植物からのVOC収集・SERS分析基質を開発し、健全な綿花と食害綿花の差異を検出・評価しているため、植物状態の取得法が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The article describes SERS-based VOC phenotyping of teas and cotton plants, but no public phenotype dataset, image/sensor data, author analysis code, or trained model is deposited. The Supporting Information is only a PDF of supplementary figures/concentration approximations, and analysis was done in MATLAB, JMP, and R

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.