PhenoWell® – A novel screening system for soil-grown plants

Abstract

As agricultural production is reaching its limits regarding outputs and land use, the need to further improve crop yield is greater than ever. The limited translatability from in vitro lab results into more natural growth conditions in soil remains problematic. Although considerable progress has been made in developing soil-growth assays to tackle this bottleneck, the majority of these assays use pots or whole trays, making them not only space- and resource-intensive, but also hampering the individual treatment of plants. Therefore, we developed a flexible and compact screening system in which individual seedlings are grown in wells filled with soil. The combination of an insert plate, containing the wells, with an adapter plate, containing reservoirs, allows for single-plant irrigation, different liquid treatments and mimicking stress conditions. The system makes use of an automated image-analysis pipeline that extracts multiple growth parameters from individual seedlings over the time course of the experiment, including projected rosette area, relative growth rate, compactness, and stockiness. The system is also optimized for maize with results that are consistent with Arabidopsis while different in amplitude. We conclude that the PhenoWell® system enables the translation of results obtained from in vitro studies into useful applications in soil.

Plant phenotyping relevance

土壌栽培植物向けのスクリーニングシステムと自動画像解析パイプラインを開発し、複数の成長形態形質を時系列抽出しているため、フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's phenotyping data and the in-house image-analysis algorithm are both available only upon request; no public dataset, code repository, or supplement with paper-specific assets is provided. OpenCV is a generic third-party library, not an authors' asset.

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.