Diagnosis of HLB-asymptomatic citrus fruits by element migration and transformation using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Abstract

Huanglongbing (HLB) is one of the most devastating bacterial diseases in citrus growth and there is no cure for it. The mastery of elemental migration and transformation patterns can effectively analyze the growth of crops. The law of element migration and transformation in citrus growth is not very clear. In order to obtain the law of element migration and transformation, healthy and HLB-asymptomatic navel oranges collected in the field were taken as research objects. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is an atomic spectrometry technique for material component analysis. By analyzing the element composition of fruit flesh, peel and soil, it can know the specific process of nutrient exchange and energy exchange between plants and the external environment, as well as the rules of internal nutrient transportation, distribution and energy transformation. Through the study of elemental absorption, the growth of navel orange can be effectively monitored in real time. HLB has an inhibitory effect on the absorption of navel orange. In order to improve the detection efficiency, LIBS coupled with SVM algorithms was used to distinguish healthy navel oranges and HLB-asymptomatic navel oranges. The classification accuracy was 100%. Compared with the traditional detection method, the detection efficiency of LIBS technology is significantly better than the polymerase chain reaction method, which provides a new means for the diagnosis of HLB-asymptomatic citrus fruits.