Nondestructive and Fast Vibration Phenotyping of Plants

Abstract

<jats:p>The frequencies of free oscillations of plants, or plant parts, depend on their geometries, stiffnesses, and masses. Besides direct biomechanical interest, free frequencies also provide insights into plant properties that can usually only be measured destructively or with low-throughput techniques (e.g., change in mass, tissue density, or stiffness over development or with stresses). We propose here a new high-throughput method based on the noncontact measurements of the free frequencies of the standing plant. The plant is excited by short air pulses (typically 100 ms). The resulting motion is recorded by a high speed video camera (100 fps) and processed using fast space and time correlation algorithms. In less than a minute the mechanical behavior of the plant is tested over several directions. The performance and versatility of this method has been tested in three contrasted species: tobacco (Nicotiana benthamian), wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), and poplar (Populus sp.), for a total of more than 4000 data points. In tobacco we show that water stress decreased the free frequency by 15%. In wheat we could detect variations of less than 1 g in the mass of spikes. In poplar we could measure frequencies of both the whole stem and leaves. The work provides insight into new potential directions for development of phenotyping.</jats:p>

Cellular transduction of mechanical oscillations in plants by the plasma-membrane mechanosensitive channel MSL10

“…To characterize the response of Arabidopsis to wind mechanical stimulation, we examined the frequency of free oscillations of plants with a young flowering stem subjected to a short air pulse (Movie S1). Using the Vibration Phenotyping System (19) (Movie S2) we determined the image correlation coefficient depicting the pendulum movement of the stem on six plants and obtained a mean frequency of 2.8 ± 1.0 Hz (mean ± SD, n = 131) (Fig. 1A).…”

Wind and obstacle motion affect honeybee flight strategies in cluttered environments

“…Obstacles were positioned on a platform that could oscillate laterally relative to the tunnel's long axis with a peak-to-peak amplitude of 2.1 cm (Fig. 1A) and a frequency of 3 Hz, which is within the range of fluttering motions observed for individual leaves and plant stems in wind (Py et al, 2006;Kothari and Burnett, 2017;de Langre et al, 2019). The oscillation amplitude was smaller than the spacing between obstacles, resulting in a 1.9-cm space between adjacent obstacles through which moving obstacles never passed (i.e.…”

A new perspective on mechanical characterisation of Arabidopsis stems through vibration tests

“…Recently two other vibration-based methods for characterisation of plants have been developed, namely the methods described in Nakata et al (2018) andde Langre et al (2019). In the following section we give a comparison of these methods with the current approach that is summarised in Table 4.…”

“…In addition, vibration methods have found a number of applications on plants beyond the quantitative evaluation of their mechanical properties. For example, recently, free vibrations were utilised for the development of a non-destructive, high-throughput phenotyping method that can be applied on various plants (de Langre et al, 2019). An overview of vibrations in plants, including experimental methods for measuring them, is given by de Langre (2019).…”