Large-scale high-throughput plant phenotyping (sometimes called phenomics) is becoming increasingly important in plant biology and agriculture and is essential to cutting-edge plant breeding and management approaches needed to meet the food and fuel needs for the next century. Currently, the application of these approaches is severely limited by the availability of appropriate instrumentation and by the ability to communicate experimental protocols, results and analyses. To address these issues, we have developed a low-cost, yet sophisticated open-source scientific instrument designed to enable communities of researchers, plant breeders, educators, farmers and citizen scientists to collect high-quality field data on a large scale. The MultispeQ provides measurements in the field or laboratory of both, environmental conditions (light intensity and quality, temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, time and location) and useful plant phenotypes, including photosynthetic parameters—photosystem II quantum yield (ΦII), non-photochemical exciton quenching (NPQ), photosystem II photoinhibition, light-driven proton translocation and thylakoid proton motive force, regulation of the chloroplast ATP synthase and potentially many others—and leaf chlorophyll and other pigments. Plant phenotype data are transmitted from the MultispeQ to mobile devices, laptops or desktop computers together with key metadata that gets saved to the PhotosynQ platform (https://photosynq.org) and provides a suite of web-based tools for sharing, visualization, filtering, dissemination and analyses. We present validation experiments, comparing MultispeQ results with established platforms, and show that it can be usefully deployed in both laboratory and field settings. We present evidence that MultispeQ can be used by communities of researchers to rapidly measure, store and analyse multiple environmental and plant properties, allowing for deeper understanding of the complex interactions between plants and their environment.
Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is a nutritious crop grown around the world, a staple that provides high levels of protein and iron in the diets of Central and South Americans and East Africans. Heat stress negatively affects common bean seed yields and prevents cultivation in certain areas. Furthermore, under field conditions, heat stress often coincides with and exacerbates drought stress effects. Breeding more heat‐tolerant cultivars would stabilize seed yield and open new regions to field production. To support these efforts, we examined a variety of methods for screening large numbers of bean germplasm exposed to heat stress at the vegetative growth stage as opposed to the reproductive stage, which would prolong the screening process. Tepary bean (P. acutifolius A. Gray), a closely related species to common bean, was used as a heat‐stress‐tolerant check. Plants exposed to day/night temperatures of 45/36°C for 2 d showed measurable signs of heat stress, but tepary bean outperformed the common beans on all stress tolerance measures. Gas exchange, chlorophyll fluorescence, and oxidative stress were only affected by this high temperature and not by temperatures below 45/36°C. Heat stress measurements also correlated well with visual signs of leaf tissue damage. Gradually raising temperatures was useful for screening large number of entries for heat tolerance, but this heat tolerance was only partially related to drought tolerance in the field. Plant breeders can use some of these methods to supplement field data and to further characterize the stress tolerance of bean lines.
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