LiU and UPSC teams publish a new article in iScience

LiU and UPSC teams publish a new article in iScience

The research group at Linköping University led by Eleni Stavrinidou, together with Totte Niittylä and his group from Umeå Plant Science Centre, has developed sugar sensors based on organic electrochemical transistors that can be implanted in plants. The results are now published in the article Diurnal in Vivo Xylem Sap Glucose and Sucrose Monitoring Using Implantable Organic Electrochemical Transistor Sensors Chiara Diacci, Tayebeh Abedi, Jeewoong Lee, Erik O. Gabrielsson, Magnus Berggren, Daniel T. Simon, Totte Niittylä, Eleni Stavrinidou iScience 2020 doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101966

Bioelectronic devices that convert biochemical signals to electronic readout enable biosensing with high spatiotemporal resolution. These technologies have been primarily applied in biomedicine while in plants sensing is mainly based on invasive methods that require tissue sampling, hindering in-vivo detection and having poor spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we developed enzymatic biosensors based on organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) for in-vivo and real time monitoring of sugar fluctuations in the vascular tissue of trees. The glucose and sucrose OECT-biosensors were implanted into the vascular tissue of trees and were operated through a low-cost portable unit for 48hr. Our work consists a proof-of-concept study where implantable OECT-biosensors not only allow real time monitoring of metabolites in plants but also reveal new insights into diurnal sugar homeostasis.

We anticipate that this work will contribute to establishing bioelectronic technologies as powerful minimally invasive tools in plant science, agriculture and forestry.