A method for continuously monitoring the quality of Masson pine seedlings

Root growth potential (RGP) is a popular physiological indicator used to evaluate seedling vigor. However, the time scale used in the RGP test is the order of days, which leads to poor performance of the RGP method. We propose an optical interference method, called statistical interferometry, to measure minute root elongation at a sub-nanometer scale, which can decrease the time used in measuring RGP. The time scale of this method is also 104 times less than that of the RGP method. Because we can measure the length of root elongation continuously, we can compute the root elongation rate (RER), which is the variety of the length of root elongation per second. Continuous monitoring can help determine the quality of Masson pine seedling as soon as possible. To show the effectiveness of our proposed method, we designed an experiment, in which we applied different water stresses to our collected Masson pine seedlings and acquired two groups of pines, representing two different qualities: one stressed by water and one not. After measuring the RER of the groups in our experiments, we found that RER is interrelated with the quality of seedlings.