High Throughput Phenotyping For Wheat Breeding and Genetics

Recent advances in high-throughput genotyping have quickly reduced the cost of genotyping and enabled rapid selections on large breeding populations. In contrast, advances in high-throughput phenotypic characterization of breeding and genetic populations have lagged behind. In many breeding programs the limiting factor in the amount of material that can be evaluated is the time and resources that are needed for phenotypic evaluation in the field. Likewise, many large genetic studies are limited by the number of lines that can be accurately phenotyped. To start addressing some of these constraints, we are developing high-throughput phenotyping platforms for field-based experiments. We are using proximal sensing of field plots combined with precision GPS to rapidly capture phenotypic data that can be assigned to individual plots using geo-referencing. This type of system is shown to be a robust and highly flexible platform for use in these studies. Further, the rapid assessment of field entries, on the order of < 1 sec per plot, provides a phenotyping tool to not only evaluate huge field experiments, but also collect multi-temporal data.