I would like to measure electrolyte leakage from plant material after exposure to stress. Stress damages cell membrane integrity, resulting in efflux of intracellular components to the surrounding solution. This can be measured by means of an Electrical Conductivity (EC) meter which measures the potential of an electrical current to be transported through water.
Plants have a wide range of electrolytes which leak out of the cell, such as K+, Na+, Cl–, Ca2+, Mg2+, O2-, NO3-, PO43− the list is near endless. When a cell membrane is damaged due to (a)biotic stress, electrolytes leak towards the outside of the cell. A standard protocol to measure such electrolyte leakage can be found here.
I want to make my protocol high-throughput and optimized, and measuring every sample separately with an EC meter is very time demanding. Therefore I wonder if there are specific color reagents or chemical reactions which change their color in response to electrolyte presence. This is much easier to translate to for example a plate format. I find literature on this topic very scarce, I was for instance able to find some on free ion concentration by means of ion increment method, or colorimetric assays for specific ions but nothing as an indicator for EC. Would this theoretically be possible?