High-Throughput Phenotyping Of Cereals At The Plant Accelerator

Genetics and genomics are powerful tools for gene discovery. However, the ability to phenotype at high throughput plant growth and function is forming a bottleneck in discovering the role of genetic loci in plants. Increasingly efficient transgenic technologies are generating large numbers of GM crop plants; and the genotyping of mapping and mutant populations is now highly efficient. However, the ability to quantitatively phenotype these populations is limiting progress in plant science.

The Plant Accelerator^®, headquarters of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility, was built to help alleviate the phenotyping bottleneck and accelerate advances in crop physiology and genetics. It houses fully automated imaging and watering systems, allowing large scale phenotypic screens under various stress conditions, such as salinity or water stress. Important traits, such as relative growth rate or water use efficiency can be measured non-destructively over time in a throughput that allows genetic screenings.

To take full advantage of the wealth of data generated in phenotyping experiments, novel tools are currently being developed to enable researchers to analyze their data in an efficient and timely manner. The project portal of The Plant Accelerator^® already allows researchers web access to their data output and the generation of growth curves. Further analysis tools will be added to provide a phenotype analysis pipeline.