Biosensors Used for Quantification of Nitrates in Plants

Abstract

Nitrogen is essential for the plant because it is used for the production of chlorophyll, proteins, nucleic acids, amino acids, and other cellular compounds; nitrogen is available in two forms: ammonium and nitrate. Several tools have been used to quantify nitrates in plants such as the Kjeldahl method and Dumas combustion digestion; however, they are destructive and long time-consuming methods. To solve these disadvantages, methods such as selective electrodes, optical sensors, reflectometers, and images based sensors have been developed; nonetheless, all these techniques show interference when carrying out measurements. Currently, biosensors based on genetic constructions, based on the response of promoter gene fused to Gene Fluorescent Protein (GFP), are gaining popularity, because they improve the accuracy of measurements of nitrate by avoiding the interference of carriers ion, high salt conditions, and other factors. The present review shows the different methods to quantify the nitrogen in plants; later, a biosensors perspective is presented, mainly focused on biosensors based on organism genetically modified. The review presents a list of promoter and reporter genes that could be used to develop different kind of sensors, and a perspective of sensors to measure quantitatively the nitrogen is presented.

Perspectives of Nano-Materials and Nanobiosensors in Food Safety and Agriculture

“…Nanobiosensors are now developed with all integrated devices such as power source, sensing unit, detector and display unit in a single chip for detecting the plant stress indicators [108,109]. For that various indicative signals such as increase in sucrose content [110], change in concentration of nutrients [111,112] and hormones [103] etc. can be used to further transform these in to visual indication through biosensing technology of processing signals [111,113].…”

Application of biocompost enriched with arbuscular mycorrhizae for the growth of Allium cepa L.

“…Nutrients nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium are important factors and must always be available to plants, because they function in the metabolic and biochemical processes of plant cells (Feng et al, 2020;Paiman et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2021). Nitrogen as a builder of nucleic acids, proteins, bioenzymes, and chlorophyll (Raul et al, 2016;Feng et al, 2020;Kishorekumar et al, 2020). Phosphorus as a builder of nucleic acids, phospholipids, bioenzymes, proteins, metabolic compounds, and is an important part of ATP in energy transfer (Stigter and Plaxton, 2015;Kolodiazhnyi, 2021).…”