Odbiór bodźców środowiskowych przez glony Characeae sygnalizowany za pomocą ultrasłabej luminescencji

Protecting the environment requires ensuring such conditions that organisms living in it did not suffer permanent damage to their structures and life functions. This also applies to algae living in the aquatic environment. Some species of water flora especially quickly react to negative stimuli arriving from the environment. Their reactions to experienced stress may be a subtle criterion for assessing the condition of aquatic environment. To this kind of plants belong Chara, which are bioindicators of water quality. Their response to applied environmental stimuli is rapid changes of the electrical parameters of the cell membrane. Our research shows that there is also a change in the intensity of ultraweak luminescence (UWL) generated by these plants. UWL is a phenomenon that continuously accompanies processes occurring in living cells and its intensity is less than the threshold sensitivity of the human eye. The method of measurement of this little known way of Chara's response to environmental stimuli has the advantage that it is completely non-invasive for the test material. Non-invasiveness is due to the fact that the radiation emitted from the samples is measured outside the cell membrane separating the living matter from the surrounding environment. In our study, after exposure to a selected stimulus, three types of responses of plant cells were observed: 1) - after a temporary increase of UWL, there is a return to the level of light corresponding to undisturbed homeostasis (e.g. when ascorbic acid is added to the environment); 2) - after a temporary increase in the UWL, the emission of photons slightly falls and stabilizes at a new higher level of illumination (when the stress stimulus is e.g. lead acetate, the emission intensity is 2.2 times larger than in the beginning); 3) - after a sudden and significant increase of UWL, the high emission level is maintained for many hours (e.g. after adding sucrose follows a 20-fold increase of UWL). UWL curves obtained in our experiments correlate with the changes of entropy corresponding to the disturbance of homeostasis in individual cases, depending on the applied stimulus. Respectively: for 1) - an increase of entropy is temporary and is followed by a return to values before the application of the stimulus, 2) - a lasting change occurs, which consists in an increase of entropy to a new fixed level, 3) - change in entropy is so large that its value exceeds the so-called point of no return, which means that the disorder of homeostasis leads to cell death. The application of luminescence imaging technique Single Photon Counting Imaging (SPCI) to the test cells have revealed that the emission of photons from different parts of the plant has a different intensity. When the plant suffered mechanical damage by cutting pseudoleaves, the emission from the damaged sites increased dramatically. This observation allows the damage to be located. Thanks to SPCI technique, it is also possible to track over time any repair processes. The clear differentiation of UWL kinetics leads to the conclusion that monitoring its intensity can be a good research tool in environmental protection. It makes it possible to determine whether chemicals found in the aquatic environment are harmful to a given species of plants. It can be also assessed whether the degree of the harm threatens the entire population with extinction. Thus, the presented method can be used as an ecotoxicity test.