Recent Posts

Review: Plant phenomics, from sensors to knowledge ($)

Plants adapt their form, function and metabolism to the surrounding environment. According to Tardieu et al., understanding the plant phenome requires that plant phenotypes to be studied on different spatial and temporal scales. High precision platforms are instrumental for discovery of new physiological…

Measures of interoperability of phenotypic data: minimum information requirements and formatting

If you ever tried to compare the results from two different experiments, you probably realized that small variations in the environment have big impact on how the plants grow. There is a lot to be learned from how the variation in the environment affects plant phenotypes, but currently the description…

Chlorophyll can be reduced in crop canopies with little penalty to photosynthesis

The effect of reducing leaf chlorophyll content on canopy CO2 assimilation (Acan) is somewhat contentious.  Walker et al. obtained data from 67 soybean accessions to parameterise a canopy-root-soil model (MLCan) in order to simulate the effect of altering chlorophyll levels on Acan.  There was no increase…

Deep learning for multi-task plant phenotyping

Despite the significant developments in computational biology and modern plant breeding, crop phenotyping poses challenges for automation. Previous machine learning approaches of plant phenotyping have mainly focused on leaf counting in rosette forms or leaf segmentation, and rely on large datasets not…

New Teaching Tool: Root Phenomics

Meet the newest member of the Teaching Tools in Plant Biology family, Phenomics of root system architecture: Measuring and analyzing root phenes -By Larry York and Guillaume Lobet. This teaching tool discusses the relatively young field of root system architecture quantification. It introduces the concepts…

ePlant: Visualizing and exploring multiple levels of data for hypothesis generation ($)

The application of systems biology is quite phenomenal these days for prediction-based modeling and interactive data visualization. Along with the genome sequencing of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, there has been a parallel increase in systems biology tools. Unfortunately, these tools have been…

Review: Plant phenomics, from sensors to knowledge

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Tardieu et al. have written a comprehensive and very readable overview of the current state and future challenges of plant phenomics, which they define as “the development and application of the suite of tools and methods used for three major goals — (1) capturing information on structure, function…

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

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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…

The Big Idea: Phenotyping

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Phenotyping, the process of measuring and analyzing observable plant characteristics, is a term used frequently in the College of Agriculture these days—and a technique that is now automated for field research at Purdue. The Indiana Corn and Soybean Innovation Center, a 25,500-square-foot facility…