Crop Seed Phenomics: Focus on Non-Destructive Functional Trait Phenotyping Methods and Applications

Abstract

Seeds play a critical role in ensuring food security for the earth's 8 billion people. There is great biodiversity in plant seed content traits worldwide. Consequently, the development of robust, rapid, and high-throughput methods is required for seed quality evaluation and acceleration of crop improvement. There has been considerable progress in the past 20 years in various non-destructive methods to uncover and understand plant seed phenomics. This review highlights recent advances in non-destructive seed phenomics techniques, including Fourier Transform near infrared (FT-NIR), Dispersive-Diode Array (DA-NIR), Single-Kernel (SKNIR), Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS-NIR) spectroscopy, Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI), and Micro-Computed Tomography Imaging (micro-CT). The potential applications of NIR spectroscopy are expected to continue to rise as more seed researchers, breeders, and growers successfully adopt it as a powerful non-destructive method for seed quality phenomics. It will also discuss the advantages and limitations that need to be solved for each technique and how each method could help breeders and industry with trait identification, measurement, classification, and screening or sorting of seed nutritive traits. Finally, this review will focus on the future outlook for promoting and accelerating crop improvement and sustainability.

Plant phenotyping relevance

種子の非破壊的な表現型計測手法を中心に、複数の分光・画像技術の利点、限界、形質測定への応用をレビューしており、方法論が中心である。

Code and data availability

This is a review/perspective article on non-destructive seed phenomics techniques (FT-NIR, DA-NIR, SKNIR, MEMS-NIR, HSI, micro-CT). It presents no original plant-phenotyping measurements, datasets, images, code, models, or supplements; all cited studies are prior work by other authors. No public paper-specific asset is

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.