Non-destructive methodologies applied to track the occurrence of natural micropollutants in watering: Glycine max as a biomonitor

ANALIA IRIEL; GABRIELA CORDON; ALICIA FERNÁNDEZ CIRELLI; M. GABRIELA LAGORIO

ECOTOXICOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SAFETY

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2019 p. 166 - 172

0147-6513

Groundwater is habitually used for watering purposes in rural areas where the rainfall is not enough to ade-quately cover the crop requirements. However, groundwater sources could be naturally contaminated with tracemicropollutants like As and associated elements (B, V and F) adversely affecting the plant health. In this work,non-destructive methodologies based on reflectance and chlorophyll emission processes were applied to assessthe presence of micropollutants in watering by using a widespread crop (soybean plant). One of the mostsubstantial results is that the co-occurrence of As, V, B and F in the watering solution clearly produced a sy-nergistic effect in the plants. In fact, both reflectance and fluorescence techniques were proved in this work to beeffective in detecting non-destructively stress by multielement treatment. Particularly, for reflectance mea-surements the most sensitive parameters were the derivative peak area between 480 and 560 nm and thechlorophyll content. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that it is possible to successfully use a portable hyper-spectral spectroradiometer instead of a conventional spectrophotometer as the determinations performed withboth instruments were positively correlated. Concerning fluorescence, variable emission of chlorophyll-a wasmore sensitive to stress than steady-state emission. The parameter Fv/F0 was a valuable indicator of stress but thequantum yields of PSII and NPQ stood out as the most sensitive indices with variations of around 60 and 100%respectively.