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Title: Lights, camera, action: high-throughput plant phenotyping is ready for a close-up

Author
item FAHLGREN, NOAH - Danforth Plant Science Center
item GEHAN, MALIA - Danforth Plant Science Center
item Baxter, Ivan

Submitted to: Current Opinion in Plant Biology
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/13/2015
Publication Date: 2/27/2015
Publication URL: https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/60481
Citation: Fahlgren, N., Gehan, M., Baxter, I.R. 2015. Lights, camera, action: high-throughput plant phenotyping is ready for a close-up. Current Opinion in Plant Biology. 24:93-99.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Modern techniques for crop improvement rely on both DNA sequencing and accurate quantification of plant traits to identify genes and germplasm of interest. With rapid advances in DNA sequencing technologies, plant phenotyping is now a bottleneck in advancing crop yields [1,2]. Furthermore, the environmental plasticity of plants creates an interesting interdisciplinary modeling challenge for plant scientists, computer scientists, and statisticians, and resulting models have the potential to guide adjustments in agricultural practices to optimize yield prior to genetic improvements. With increasing options in image capture and open-source analysis tools, the interdisciplinary field of high-throughput plant phenomics is poised to enter a phase of exponential growth. The last few years have seen focus shift from platform development to biology, but have also revealed the necessary improvements to hardware, software, and community resources required to advance the field. This review highlights recent developments in high-throughput image-based plant phenotyping of above-ground plant tissues, and discusses the next steps and obstacles that the field will encounter.