Nuclear Radiation Monitoring Using Plants

Date

2018-09-10

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Islam, M., Janssen, D., Romero-Talamas, C., Kostov, D., Wang, W., Liu, Z., Singh, N. B., and Choa, F. (September 10, 2018). "Nuclear Radiation Monitoring Using Plants." ASME. ASME J of Nuclear Rad Sci. October 2018; 4(4): 041016. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4040364

Rights

@ 2018 by ASME.

Subjects

Abstract

Plants exhibit complex responses to change in environmental conditions such as radiant heat flux, water quality, airborne pollutants, and soil contents. We seek to utilize natural chemical and electrophysiological response of plants to develop novel plant-based sensor networks. Our present work focuses on plant responses to nuclear radiation—with the goal of monitoring plant responses as benchmarks for detection and dosimetry. In our study, we used plants including Cactus, Arabidopsis, Dwarf mango (pine), Euymus, and Azela. We demonstrated that these plants Chlorophyll-a (F680) to Chlorophyll-b (F735) ratio can be changed according to the radiation dose amount. The recovery processes and speed are different for different plants.