Amazing stuff!
"Guttation is the release of fluid through small pores on leaf margins called hydathodes, and it occurs when root pressure exceeds transpiration. Guttation provides an accessible readout of a plant’s nutritional, metabolic, and stress status, but its small volume and rapid evaporation make continuous sampling difficult. Drawing on noninvasive sweat sensors for humans, Xue et al. designed a microfluidic electrochemical monitoring platform called PlantIonics.
Its wedge-shaped microchannel, inspired by the pitcher plant’s rim, provides a self-driven, unidirectional flow.
A multichannel sensing array measures sodium, potassium, and glucose alongside on-leaf temperature and humidity. This allows noninvasive monitoring of stress-induced changes in these biomarkers over several days across multiple plant species, representing a step toward precision agriculture."
From the abstract:
"Plant guttation fluid provides a chemically informative readout of internal plant status, offering an externally accessible window into plant physiological processes. However, its minute volume, intermittent availability, and susceptibility to evaporation limit its use for continuous biochemical monitoring.
Here we introduce PlantIonics, an integrated on-leaf microfluidic electrochemical platform for real-time, non-invasive monitoring of guttation biomarkers and leaf microenvironment.
A bioinspired wedge-shaped microchannel with asymmetric wettability achieves rapid (0.6 s) and unidirectional self-driven fluid collection, providing a continuously refreshed sensing interface for dynamic guttation profiling.
Combined with a multichannel sensor array and a compact wireless flexible printed circuit board, PlantIonics simultaneously measures guttation-fluid biomarkers (potassium, sodium, glucose) and local leaf microenvironment.
Multi-day on-plant studies demonstrate stress-responsive guttation fluctuations that correlate with root-level ionic perturbations and light modulation, demonstrating the platform’s capability to monitor dynamic physiological regulation.
PlantIonics establishes a sweat-inspired analytical framework for non-invasive plant monitoring, offering opportunities for early stress diagnostics, field phenotyping, and precision agriculture."
A multiplexed wearable microfluidic platform for non-invasive sweat-inspired monitoring of plant guttation biomarkers (open access)
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