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A significant increase in the use of the herbicide glyphosate has generated many questions about its residual accumulation in the environment and possible damage to crops. In this study, changes in chlorophyll a (chl-a) fluorescence induced by glyphosate in three varieties of glyphosate-resistant soybean plants were determined with an in vivo analysis based on a portable laser-induced fluorescence system. Strong suppression of chl-a fluorescence was observed for all plants treated with the herbicide. Moreover, the ratio of the emission bands in the red and far-red regions (685 nm/735 nm) indicates that the application of glyphosate led to chlorophyll degradation. The results also indicated that the use of glyphosate, even at concentrations recommended by the manufacturer, suppressed chl-a fluorescence. In summary, this study shows that fluorescence spectroscopy can detect, in vivo, very early changes in the photosynthetic status of transgenic soybeans treated with this herbicide.

In the last few years, silver nanoparticles have been proposed as a promising alternative for the label-free detection of proteins via metal-enhanced fluorescence. Generally, the aromatic amino acid tryptophan is most frequently used in this type of studies, because the intrinsic fluorescence of proteins is usually dominated by tryptophan emissions. In the present study, we evaluated the fluorescence behavior of tryptophan in the presence of a silver colloid with nanoparticles of 100 nm in diameter. The results showed that a nanoparticles concentration of 32 mg L−1 induced maximum fluorescence enhancement. However, the metal-enhanced fluorescence was dependent on the emission wavelength of tryptophan, and this phenomenon was closely related to the metal surface reabsorption process (inner filter effect), suggesting that the plasmon resonance reabsorption effect should be taken into account in analyses involving protein studies by metal-enhanced fluorescence.

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