The combination of gas-phase fluorophore technology and automation to enable high-throughput analysis of plant respiration

Mitochondrial respiration in the dark (R dark) is a critical plant physiological process, and hence a reliable, efficient and high-throughput method of measuring variation in rates of R dark is essential for agronomic and ecological studies. However, currently methods used to measure R dark in plant tissues are typically low throughput. We assessed a high-throughput automated fluorophore system of detecting multiple O2 consumption rates. The fluorophore technique was compared with O2-electrodes, infrared gas analysers (IRGA), and membrane inlet mass spectrometry, to determine accuracy and speed of detecting respiratory fluxes