Advances in surface-enhanced Raman scattering applications for precision
agriculture: monitoring plant health and crop quality
#MMPMID41384072
Nguyen HA
; Nga DTN
; Cuong TD
; Quan Doan M
; Le AT
RSC Adv
2025[Dec]; 15
(57
): 49320-49352
PMID41384072
show ga
Ensuring plant health and crop quality is vital for sustainable modern
agriculture. Conventional detection methods for stress markers, contaminants, and
pathogens are often constrained by labor-intensive procedures, bulky equipment,
and reliance on centralized facilities, limiting real-time field monitoring.
Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has emerged as a promising solution,
providing rapid, ultrasensitive, and non-destructive analysis across plant, soil,
and water matrices. This review outlines the fundamental SERS mechanisms and
strategies that boost sensing performance, and surveys recent advances in
monitoring throughout the cultivation cycle, covering plant stress markers,
metabolites, contaminants, and plant pathogens under realistic agricultural
conditions. Emphasis is placed on substrate architecture (hot-spot control,
composites/heterostructures, functionalization, flexible formats), enhancement
mechanisms, and analytical performance (typical enhancement factor (EF), limit of
detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ), and relative standard deviation
(RSD) ranges). Persistent challenges, including substrate reproducibility, matrix
interference, quantitative calibration, and scalable fabrication for field
deployment, are evaluated alongside emerging solutions, including matrix-aware
calibration (with ratiometric readout), fluorescence-robust preprocessing, and
durable, large-area platforms. We close with practical considerations for
durability and cost and with future perspectives toward next-generation,
field-ready SERS tools for proactive plant-health management and crop-quality
assurance.
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