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. 2020 Jul 20;10:12005. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-68875-6

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Material composition analysis of pristine pollen grains and Fe-decorated sporopollenins measured by means of EDX technique. Panel (a) reports a compositional map of the pollen grains, showing that chemical elements composing it mainly consist in sulfur (red), potassium (green), oxygen (blue) and phosphorus (light blue). Panels (b–e) report maps showing the homogeneous distribution of each single listed component. In order to compare the elemental composition of pristine pollen grains with Fe-decorated sporopollenins, the very same characterization was also performed on the latter. The measured compositional map is reported in panel (f), showing that along with the same elements composing pristine grains, also iron (purple) and chlorine (yellow) are found in the examined sporopollenins. Panels (g–l) report single maps showing each element composing the analyzed sample. In panels (m, n) compositional spectra are reported for a pristine grain sample and a Fe-decorated sporopollenin respectively. Remarkably, in the spectrum relative to the latter sample peaks relative to chlorine and iron are visible, while they are absent in the pristine grain spectrum.