Common Bean Breeding in Zambia: Harnessing New Phenotyping Technologies

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) is a food security crop, and a major source of protein for many households in Zambia. Drought is a major cause of common bean yield losses in Zambia. Breeding for drought resistance in common bean remains, progress in breeding for drought resistance has been slow. One of the challenges has been lack of affordable equipment and data analytics, especially in developing countries that could provide reliable, high quality measurements of phenotypic parameters under local field conditions. In this work, we demonstrated the use of a new, open PhotosynQ platform (www.photosynq.org), together with a low-cost plant phenotyping instrument called MultispeQ, to perform a complete genome-wide association analysis. Using the Andean diversity panel of common bean grown in Zambia, we identified genomic regions controlling photosynthetic performance under moisture stress. Previous work using the PhotosynQ demonstrated a strong link between the photosynthetic parameters measured by MultispeQ and ultimate crop yield, suggesting that these QTLs may be important for improving crop performance. These initial results demonstrate the potential of the PhotosynQ and MultispeQ as useful phenotyping tools in breeding for drought tolerance in common bean. In the next phase of work, we plan to make the integrated phenotyping/analytics tools available to a broader community and to provide a first-level test of their ability to improve crop varieties.