Normal or excessive oxidative metabolism in organisms is essential in physiological and pathophysiological processes, respectively. Therefore, monitoring of biological oxidative processes induced by the chemical or physical stimuli is nowadays of extreme importance due to the environment overloaded with various physicochemical factors. Current techniques typically require the addition of chemical labels or light illumination, which perturb the samples to be analyzed. Moreover, the current techniques are very demanding in terms of sample preparation and equipment. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a label-free monitoring tool of oxidation based on biological autoluminescence (BAL). We demonstrate this tool on Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell culture. We showed that BAL can be used to monitor chemical perturbation of yeast due to Fenton reagents initiated oxidation-the BAL intensity changes with hydrogen peroxide concentration in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, we also showed that BAL reflects the effects of low-frequency magnetic field on the yeast cell culture, where we observed a disturbance of the BAL kinetics in the exposed vs. control case. Our results contribute to the development of novel techniques for label-free, real-time, noninvasive monitoring of oxidative processes and approaches for their modulation.

• MeSH
• Cellulose analogs & derivatives   pharmacology   MeSH
• Drug Combinations MeSH
• Culture Techniques MeSH
• Luminescence * MeSH
• Oxidation-Reduction drug effects   MeSH
• Povidone pharmacology   MeSH
• Saccharomyces cerevisiae cytology   drug effects   metabolism   MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH
• Names of Substances
• Cellulose MeSH
• Drug Combinations MeSH
• hyetellose, povidone drug combination MeSH Browser
• Povidone MeSH

Biological systems manifest continuous weak autoluminescence, which is present even in the absence of external stimuli. Since this autoluminescence arises from internal metabolic and physiological processes, several works suggested that it could carry information in the time series of the detected photon counts. However, there is little experimental work which would show any difference of this signal from random Poisson noise and some works were prone to artifacts due to lacking or improper reference signals. Here we apply rigorous statistical methods and advanced reference signals to test the hypothesis whether time series of autoluminescence from germinating mung beans display any intrinsic correlations. Utilizing the fractional Brownian bridge that employs short samples of time series in the method kernel, we suggest that the detected autoluminescence signal from mung beans is not totally random, but it seems to involve a process with a negative memory. Our results contribute to the development of the rigorous methodology of signal analysis of photonic biosignals.

• MeSH
• Germination physiology   MeSH
• Luminescence * MeSH
• Vigna growth & development   MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH

BACKGROUND: A brief review is given of Peter W. Barlows' contributions to research on gravity tide-related phenomena in plant biology, or 'selenonastic' effects as he called them, including his early research on root growth. Also, new results are presented here from long-term recordings of spontaneous ultra-weak light emission during germination, reinforcing the relationship between local lunisolar tidal acceleration and seedling growth. SCOPE: The main ideas and broad relevance of the work by Barlow and his collaborators about the effects of gravity on plants are reviewed, highlighting the necessity of new models to explain the apparent synchronism between root growth and microscale gravity changes 107 times lower than that exerted by the Earth's gravity. The new results, showing for the first time the germination of coffee beans in sequential tests over 2 months, confirm the co-variation between the patterns in ultra-weak light emission and the lunisolar tidal gravity curves for the initial growth phase. For young sprouts (<1 month old), the rhythm of growth as well as variation in light emission exhibit the once a day and twice a day periodic variations, frequency components that are the hallmark of local lunisolar gravimetric tides. Although present, this pattern is less pronounced in coffee beans older than 1 month. CONCLUSIONS: The apparent co-variation between ultra-weak light emission and growth pattern in coffee seedlings and the lunisolar gravity cycles corroborate those previously found in seedlings from other species. It is proposed here that such patterns may attenuate with time for older sprouts with slow development. These data suggest that new models considering both intra- and intercellular interactions are needed to explain the putative sensing and reaction of seedlings to the variations in the gravimetric tide. Here, a possible model is presented based on supracellular matrix interconnections.

• MeSH
• Coffea physiology   MeSH
• History, 20th Century MeSH
• History, 21st Century MeSH
• Plant Physiological Phenomena * MeSH
• Gravitation * MeSH
• Germination physiology   MeSH
• Light * MeSH
• Check Tag
• History, 20th Century MeSH
• History, 21st Century MeSH
• Publication type
• Biography MeSH
• Journal Article MeSH
• Historical Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH
• Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S. MeSH

• About
• Barlow, Peter

It is well known that all biological systems which undergo oxidative metabolism or oxidative stress generate a small amount of light. Since the origin of excited states producing this light is generally accepted to come from chemical reactions, the term endogenous biological chemiluminescence is appropriate. Apart from biomedicine, this phenomenon has potential applications also in plant biology and agriculture like monitoring the germination rate of seeds. While chemiluminescence capability to monitor germination has been measured on multiple agriculturally relevant plants, the standard model plant Arabidopsis thaliana has not been analyzed for this process so far. To fill in this gap, we demonstrate here on A. thaliana that the intensity of endogenous chemiluminescence increases during the germination stage. We showed that the chemiluminescence intensity increases since the second day of germination, but reaches a plateau on the third day, in contrast to other plants germinating from larger seeds studied so far. We also showed that intensity increases after topical application of hydrogen peroxide in a dose-dependent manner. Further, we demonstrated that the entropy of the chemiluminescence time series is similar to random Poisson signals. Our results support a notion that metabolism and oxidative reactions are underlying processes which generate endogenous biological chemiluminescence. Our findings contribute to novel methods for non-invasive and label-free sensing of oxidative processes in plant biology and agriculture.

• MeSH
• Arabidopsis genetics   growth & development   metabolism   MeSH
• Biomarkers MeSH
• Germination * genetics   MeSH
• Luminescence * MeSH
• Oxidation-Reduction drug effects   MeSH
• Oxidative Stress MeSH
• Hydrogen Peroxide metabolism   pharmacology   MeSH
• Seeds genetics   growth & development   metabolism   MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH
• Names of Substances
• Biomarkers MeSH
• Hydrogen Peroxide MeSH

Photonic signals are broadly exploited in communication and sensing and they typically exhibit Poisson-like statistics. In a common scenario where the intensity of the photonic signals is low and one needs to remove a nonstationary trend of the signals for any further analysis, one faces an obstacle: due to the dependence between the mean and variance typical for a Poisson-like process, information about the trend remains in the variance even after the trend has been subtracted, possibly yielding artifactual results in further analyses. Commonly available detrending or normalizing methods cannot cope with this issue. To alleviate this issue we developed a suitable pre-processing method for the signals that originate from a Poisson-like process. In this paper, a Poisson pre-processing method for nonstationary time series with Poisson distribution is developed and tested on computer-generated model data and experimental data of chemiluminescence from human neutrophils and mung seeds. The presented method transforms a nonstationary Poisson signal into a stationary signal with a Poisson distribution while preserving the type of photocount distribution and phase-space structure of the signal. The importance of the suggested pre-processing method is shown in Fano factor and Hurst exponent analysis of both computer-generated model signals and experimental photonic signals. It is demonstrated that our pre-processing method is superior to standard detrending-based methods whenever further signal analysis is sensitive to variance of the signal.

• MeSH
• Photons * MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Neutrophils metabolism   MeSH
• Computer Simulation MeSH
• Poisson Distribution * MeSH
• Check Tag
• Humans MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH