Early detection and monitoring of plant diseases by Bioelectric Impedance Spectroscopy

Abstract

Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy, EIS, is widely used in the study of electrical properties and structure of biological tissues, namely in quality control of fruits and the characterization of specific botanical tissues. The present work aims to extend the EIS concept to identify structure damaging pathologies for in vivo vegetal tissue. This allows for the early detection of specific plant diseases with economic and environmental impact. Moreover, the commercially available EIS solutions miss a true frequency bandwidth analysis and, despite the general good performance, are unspecified for bioimpedance measurements and are often quite expensive. Consequently, these limitations are the main reason for erroneous interpretations and inaccurate results. Therefore, this work proposes the development of a dedicated bioEIS system, characterized by an appropriated frequency range (1kHz to 1MHz), suitable for biological applications, in such a way that it becomes possible to compensate the influence of potential errors in off-line analysis.