Biophotons - New Experimental Data and Analysis

" Biophotons are an ultra-weak emission of photons in the visible energy range from living matter. In this work we study the emission from germinating seeds using an experimental technique designed to detect light of extremely small intensity. The emission from lentil seeds and single bean was analyzed during the whole germination process in terms of both the different spectral components through low pass filters and the different count distributions in the various stages of the germination process. Although the shape of the emission spectrum appears to be very similar in the two samples used in our experiment, our analysis is able to highlight the differences present in the two cases. In this way it was possible to correlate the various types of emissions to the degree of development of the seed during germination."

" Despite the wealth of experimental results, the questions of what biophotons are, how they are generated and how they are involved with life are still open. There are two hypotheses about it [5,6]. The first sees the emission as the random radiative decay of some molecules excited by metabolic events while the second hypothesis assigns the emission to a coherent electromagnetic field generated within and between the cells by some biochemical reactions in which, perhaps, oxygen atoms are involved."

" At the same time, there are several experimental evidences that such radiation carries important biological information [7,8], for example, the radiation emitted by growing plants or organisms can increase the cell division rate in similar organisms by as much as 30%, the so-called mitogenetic effect [9,10,11]."

" In a recent work our group proposed the Diffusion Entropy Analysis (DEA) approach to analyze the time series produced by the photon counting of germinating lentils. … Always in this work it is highlighted as at the beginning of germination the condition of anomalous diffusion in realized with the clear presence of crucial events. On the other side, when the seeds generate roots the complexity of the biophoton signal changes completely its nature and the departure from the condition of random diffusion is due to Fractional Brownian Motion (FBM) [15]. This result yields an impressive similarity with which found by the authors of Ref. 16, who analyzed the heartbeats of patients under the influence of autonomic neuropathy. In this case the increasing severity of this disease has the effect of moving from a complexity condition generated by crucial events to a complexity condition characterized by the FBM infinite memory."

" The analysis of the various spectral components clearly shows how these change throughout the germination period. We have shown how these change their relative weight in the total emissions and how this is in some way connected with the details of the emission, in particular the different slopes observed in the spectra. This behavior could be a clear signal that during the germination period the parts of the seed involved in the emission process change according to the development of the plants."