Breakthrough Technology: High-throughput phenotyping and QTL mapping of maize

Zhang et al. identify the goal of high-throughput phenotyping as to “bridge the gap between genomics and phenomics”. In this Breakthrough Technology report, they used automatic phenotyping to quantify more than 100 traits across 16 developmental stages in a maize recombinant inbred line population, and identified 988 QTL (quantitative trait loci) corresponding to these traits. Several genes not previously connected to growth rate were identified. Plant Physiol. 10.1104/pp.16.01516