ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Technical Advances in Plant Science
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancement in Photonic Sensing for Abiotic Stress Management in Horticultural and Plant Nursery SectorsView all 8 articles
Real-Time and Non-Invasive Monitoring of Plant Signaling by Means of Optical Coherence Tomography
Provisionally accepted
Adrien Alexis Paul Chauvet*
Stephen J Matcher- The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
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Abstract: This work demonstrates the use of OCT for studying plant's long-range signaling in real-time, in-vivo, and non-invasively. This feat is achieved using OCT as a novel technique to visualize minute cellular displacements and deformations within the plant's leaves. The use of bespoke registration algorithms enables tracking displacements with a precision greater than 0.1 μm. This measurement precision is one order of magnitude better than the typical ~1 μm optical resolution of OCT images. In the present work, OCT is used to analyze the time-evolution of deformations incurred by wounding. The use of OCT enabled to (1) visualize, in real time, the propagation and evolution of the morphological changes associated with slow wave potentials (onset, peak, and recovery), (2) to compute propagation speeds (~ 0.07 cm s-1), and (3) to distinguish the type of deformation incurred (transient bending of the leaf due to changes in turgor cell pressure). This proof-of-concept study thus exemplifies the potentials of OCT as a convenient and complementary tool to study plant's response mechanisms in-vivo and in real-time.
Keywords: Slow wave potential, plant, Optical Coherence Tomography, signaling, Registration
Received: 10 Sep 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chauvet and Matcher. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Adrien Alexis Paul Chauvet, a.chauvet@sheffield.ac.uk
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