Assessment of radicule germination in gooseberry’s seeds by laser speckle.

Resumen

Bio-speckle is an interference phenomenon produced by different reflected portions of an incident laser beam over a living material which experiments a deformation or movement. The speckle pattern fluctuates over time reflecting those diverse changes that occur in the observed organism. This non-intrusive and non-destructive analysis of a biological sample allowed us to characterize the germination process of seeds of gooseberry or uchuva (Physalis peruviana L.), a solanaceous plant endemic from the Andean tropics. We hydrated a set of seeds to facilitate germination. Seeds were irradiated simultaneously with red coherent light (He-Ne laser) and digital images were processed using Fujii’s  method. Results indicated that cell grow can be detected by this technique, as the growing tissue associated with seed embryos shows a distributed speckle activity. Speckle activity is more notorious in protruding areas. Vis à vis the fact that we are observing a developing embryo, we hypothesizes that the biospeckle observed here might be related with a morphic field