High throughput phenotyping to accelerate crop breeding and monitoring of diseases in the field ($)

High throughput phenotyping (HTP) is a frontier in plant biology. Shakoor et al. review the state of HTP and various levels of implementation, current limitations, and the new horizons for the field. Envirotyping – getting all the information possible from an individual plant in a field to fully understand its context and phenotype – is a large-scale future goal in agricultural research. Monitoring via field sensors to satellite imaging to diagnose disease outbreaks and assess plant growth traits also strongly dovetails with Earth monitoring efforts of other scientists. Improving technologies show promise in stopping plant pathogens, predicting high-yielding genotypes early in a season, and more. However there are experimental design, data collection, analysis, and computing power issues to grapple with. Based on this review, scientists are doing just that. Curr. Opin. Plant Biol. 10.1016/j.pbi.2017.05.006   (Suggested by Jennifer Mach)