Long term delayed luminescence: A possible fast and convenient assay for nutrition deficiencies and environmental pollution damages in plants

Abstract

Long Term Delayed Luminescence (LDL) of green plants ranging from 0.3 s up to several minutes after irradiation has been found to exhibit complex decay kinetics which are highly dependent on nutritional deficiencies and environmental pollutive components. As a model organism we utilized the unicellular green alga Scenedesmus obliquus with fairly well understood properties of LDL probably involving both photosynthetic reaction centers PS I and PS II. It is shown that LDL is strongly affected both by depletion of the growth medium of various essential elements such as N, Fe, Ca, Mg or K, as well as by growth in the presence of environmental stress factors such as Cu, Hg, Cd or NO2-. Therefore, LDL offers itself as a convenient, highly sensitive and specific assay for a number of stress factors in photosynthesizing plants in vivo and in the field. © 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers.