Bettina Berger
Non-destructive high-throughput phenotyping to study cereals under stress conditions
The Plant Accelerator and Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, The University of Adelaide, Waite Campus, Urrbrae.
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 increasing power of digital imaging and computational technologies offers the opportunity to relieve this phenotyping bottleneck. The Plant Acceleratorâ is a new 4500 m2 growth facility which provides -omic-scale shoot phenotyping of large populations of plants using automated plant handling and digital imaging. Current projects use the phenotyping capacity to analyze cereals under various stress conditions, including water deficit and salinity. First results and the experimental approach taken will be discussed.