In Vivo Non-Destructive Monitoring of Capsicum Annuum Seed Growth with Diverse NaCl Concentrations Using Optical Detection Technique.

Abstract

We demonstrate that optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a plausible optical tool for in vivo detection of plant seeds and its morphological changes during growth. To investigate the direct impact of salt stress on seed germination, the experiment was conducted using Capsicum annuum seeds that were treated with different molar concentrations of NaCl. To determine the optimal concentration for the seed growth, the seeds were monitored for nine consecutive days. In vivo two-dimensional OCT images of the treated seeds were obtained and compared with the images of seeds that were grown using sterile distilled water. The obtained results confirm the feasibility of using OCT for the proposed application. Normalized depth profile analysis was utilized to support the conclusions.

Code and data availability

The paper's supplementary material (Table S1) contains the paper-specific phenotyping measurements: seed weight and embryo thickness statistics for all NaCl-treated and control seed groups across the 9-day monitoring period, publicly available at the MDPI supplementary URL. No analysis code or image datasets are stated