Abstract
Adequate plant nutrition is essential for commercial crop production. There are 18 nutrients that are essential for proper crop development. Each is equally important to the plant, although they are required in vastly different amounts. The absence of any one of these nutrients has the potential to decrease crop yields and quality by negatively affecting associated growth factors. Hence, early diagnosis of nutrient imbalances or deficiencies is of crucial importance for farmers. In this work, we provide compelling evidence that electrical potential variation in a commercial tomato crop contains information, which can be modeled to detect iron (Fe) deficiency before visual symptoms appear. The proposed supervised machine learning model showed accurate prediction on test data of above 75%. A model built to classify normal conditions (full nutrients) vs. strong Fe deficiency conditions (visible symptoms), enables early detection of slight Fe deprivation i.e., 6 days prior to the appearance of the earliest visual symptoms. Continuous real-time monitoring of crop electrical signals and deployment of predictive algorithms could constitute a great practical tool to help and assist farmers in iron deficiency detection.
Highlights
Abiotic and biotic stresses provoke unfavorable environmental fluctuations, which require plants to mount defenses reprogram and adjust metabolism, growth, and development to adapt and survive
We have previously shown that an electrophysiological sensor allows continuous and stable long–term monitoring of plant electrical signals for several weeks without affecting plant functions, which can be performed in a commercial greenhouse for crop production without a Faraday cage (Tran et al, 2019)
In growing condition similar to those used by commercial growers, hydroponic tomato crops in soilless culture grown under Fe deprivation exhibit these visible symptoms first at the top of the stem after 8 days (D +8) with pale green or slight yellowing leaves
Summary
Abiotic and biotic stresses provoke unfavorable environmental fluctuations, which require plants to mount defenses reprogram and adjust metabolism, growth, and development to adapt and survive. Plants require various ions as essential nutrients, which are taken up from the soil and distributed throughout the whole plant (White and Brown, 2010; Maathuis and Diatloff, 2013) Each of these nutrients, once they are transferred to their destination within plant tissues via corresponding transporters/ion channels, plays diverse and critical roles in maintaining plant growth and development (Hänsch and Mendel, 2009). Fe is involved in a variety of metabolic processes, including mitochondrial respiration, fatty acid and protein synthesis, as well as plant photosynthesis (Kobayashi et al, 2019) It is of crucial importance for CO2 fixation and for biomass production (Zhang et al, 2019). With an essential role for chlorophyll development and function, Fe-deficient plants exhibit reduced photosynthetic activity
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