Advances in surface-enhanced Raman scattering applications for precision agriculture: monitoring plant health and crop quality

Abstract

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.