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Updated: Oct 3, 2026

A High-Resolution, Single-Grain, In Vivo Pollen Hydration Bioassay for Arabidopsis thaliana
Published on: June 30, 2023
Deep-Learning-Assisted Single-Shot Plasma Emission Imaging for Pollen Morphology Reconstruction and Apparent
James A Grant-Jacob1, Yuchen Liu1, Ben Mills1
1University of Southampton, Optoelectronics Research Centre, Southampton SO17 1BJ, GB.
Abstract:
Monitoring pollen is important for crop productivity, plant breeding, and environmental forecasting, yet current approaches remain limited in throughput and physiological insight. Here, we combine single-shot plasma emission imaging with artificial intelligence for pollen morphology reconstruction and apparent hydration state classification. Plasma plumes generated during laser-pollen interaction provide indirect measurements of pollen morphology, extending plasma-based analysis beyond conventional spectroscopic readouts. A conditional generative adversarial neural network reconstructed morphology from such plasma images, while chromaticity analysis revealed systematic color shifts between hydrated and dehydrated grains. A support vector machine using chromaticity histogram and scalar color features distinguished these groups with ∼76% leave-one-out accuracy. The results suggest that plasma emission contains structural and hydration-associated information, supporting rapid pollen morphology inference and physiological phenotyping for agricultural and environmental monitoring.

