GlyPh: a low-cost platform for phenotyping plant growth and water use

Abstract

Breeding drought-tolerant crop varieties with higher water use efficiency could help maintain food supply to a growing population and save valuable water resources. Fast and accurate phenotyping is currently a bottleneck in the process towards attaining this goal, as available plant phenotyping platforms have an excessive cost for many research institutes or breeding companies. Here we describe a simple and low-cost, automatic platform for high-throughput measurement of plant water use and growth and present its utilisation to assess the drought tolerance of two soybean genotypes. The platform allows the evaluation of up to 120 plants growing in individual pots. A cart moving in only one direction carries the measuring and watering devices. Watering and measurement routines allow the simulation of multiple water regimes for each plant individually and indicate the timing of measurement of soil water content and image capture for growth estimation. Water use, growth and water use efficiency were measured in two experiments with different water scenarios. Differences in water use efficiency between genotypes were detected only in some treatments, emphasising the importance of phenotyping platforms to evaluate a genotype’s phenotype under a broad range of conditions in order to capture valuable differences, minimising the chance of artefacts and increasing precision of measurements.

Phenotyping plants: genes, phenes and machines

“…Pereyra-Irujo et al (2012) developed such a low cost platform, which would allow it to be used by academic users and breeders. They tested the platform for measurement of water use efficiency of two different soybean genotypes under different water availability scenarios.…”

Accelerating genetic gains in legumes for the development of prosperous smallholder agriculture: integrating genomics, phenotyping, systems modelling and agronomy

“…• Simple and low-cost automatic platform for high throughput measurement of plant water use and growth to assess drought tolerance Pereyra-Irujo et al (2012) Accelerating genetic gains in legumes | 3299 2014; Hoogenboom et al, 2017), modelling interactions of plants, animals, climate, soil, and land management. Teixeira et al (2015), using APSIM, demonstrated the importance of rotations for simulating climate impact assessments and Sennhenn et al (2017) found new niches for short season legumes in Kenya.…”

Validation of plant part measurements using a 3D reconstruction method suitable for high-throughput seedling phenotyping

“…In GROWSCREEN [15], leaf area and relative growth rate were measured based on images from a camera placed above an array of seedlings. The phenotyping system GlyPh [19] is a low-cost platform for phenotyping plant growth and water use, which allows the evaluation of plants growing in individual pots. In GlyPh, top-and side-view images of the plants are captured, to measure traits such as height, width, and projected leaf area.…”