Biospectroscopic fingerprinting phytotoxicity towards environmental monitoring for food security and contaminated site remediation

Human activities have resulted in severe environmental pollution since the industrial revolution. Phytotoxicity-based environmental monitoring is well known due to its sedentary nature, abundance, and sensitivity to environmental changes, which are essential preconditions to avoiding potential environmental and ecological risks. However, conventional morphological and physiological methods for phytotoxicity assessment mainly focus on descriptive determination rather than mechanism analysis and face challenges of labour and time-consumption, lack of standardized protocol and difficulties in data interpretation. Molecular-based tests could reveal the toxicity mechanisms but fail in real-time and in-situ monitoring because of their endpoint manner and destructive operation in collecting cellular components. Herein, we systematically propose and lay out a biospectroscopic tool (e.g., infrared and Raman spectroscopy) coupled with multivariate data analysis as a relatively non-destructive and high-throughput approach to quantitatively measure phytotoxicity levels and qualitatively profile phytotoxicity mechanisms by classifying spectral fingerprints of biomolecules in plant tissues in response to environmental stresses. With established databases and multivariate analysis, this biospectroscopic fingerprinting approach allows ultrafast, in situ and on-site diagnosis of phytotoxicity. Overall, the proposed protocol and validation of biospectroscopic fingerprinting phytotoxicity can distinguish the representative biomarkers and interrogate the relevant mechanisms to quantify the stresses of interest, e.g., environmental pollutants. This state-of-the-art concept and design broaden the knowledge of phytotoxicity assessment, advance novel implementations of phytotoxicity assay, and offer vast potential for long-term field phytotoxicity monitoring trials in situ.