On the potential usefulness of Fourier spectra of delayed fluorescence from plants.

Delayed fluorescence (DF) from photosystem II (PSII) of plants can be potentially used as a biosensor for the detection of plant physiological status and environmental changes. It has been analyzed mainly in the time domain. Frequency-domain analysis through Fourier transform allows viewing a signal from another angle, but the usefulness of DF spectra has not been well studied. In this work, experiments were conducted to show the differences and similarities in DF spectra of different plants with short pulse excitation. The DF spectra show low-pass characteristics with first-order attenuation of high frequencies. The results also show that the low-frequency components differ while the high-frequency components are similar. These may imply the potential usefulness of Fourier spectra of DF to analyze photoelectron transport in plants and classify samples.