Content area
Full text
About the Authors:
Ankush Prashar
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Cell and Molecular Sciences, The James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, United Kingdom
Jane Yildiz
Affiliation: Cell and Molecular Sciences, The James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, United Kingdom
James W. McNicol
Affiliation: Biomathematics & Statistics Scotland, The James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, United Kingdom
Glenn J. Bryan
Affiliation: Cell and Molecular Sciences, The James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, United Kingdom
Hamlyn G. Jones
Affiliations Plant Science Division, University of Dundee at The James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, United Kingdom, School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
Introduction
Most breeding effort in crop plants has focused on commercially important traits such as yield and traits directly linked to commercially important traits. For further improvements there is a need to extend the range of traits studied. Although many physiological traits are critical for plant growth and development and hence contribute to yield and to tolerance of environmental stresses, they have rarely been used in plant breeding [1]. This has largely been because of the lack of appropriate high throughput phenotyping methods to the extent that phenotypic analysis is becoming the major limiting factor in plant breeding [1], [2], [3], [4].
As accurate and elaborate phenotyping is the basis of any plant study for responses to stress, there is a need to develop robust phenotyping systems. A number of laboratory or glasshouse-based phenotyping platforms such as the Keytrack System (KeyGene, The Netherlands) and Phenofab have been developed recently (see [5], [6]). These use multiple view imaging systems including thermal sensors, together with automated plant handling under controlled environment conditions to quantify plant growth and function. However, genetic analysis and breeding for most crop species is usually carried out under natural conditions because results from glasshouse trials do not always correlate well with field behaviour [7], [8], [9], [10]. Phenotyping in field trials is therefore likely to provide better insights into crop behaviour than studies under glasshouse conditions, especially for crops such as potato that have large canopy size and show restricted growth in pots [11]. Thus, there is a strong requirement and need to establish phenotyping methods that can be used to screen large crop plant populations under natural environmental conditions.
One important physiological trait, especially in...