Back to the future for drought tolerance.

Abstract

Global agriculture faces increasing pressure to produce more food with fewer resources. Drought, exacerbated by climate change, is a major agricultural constraint costing the industry an estimated US$80 billion per year in lost production. Wild relatives of domesticated crops, including wheat (Triticum spp.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), are an underutilized source of drought tolerance genes. However, managing their undesirable characteristics, assessing drought responses, and selecting lines with heritable traits remains a significant challenge. Here, we propose a novel strategy of using multi-trait selection criteria based on high-throughput spectral images to facilitate the assessment and selection challenge. The importance of measuring plant capacity for sustained carbon fixation under drought stress is explored, and an image-based transpiration efficiency (iTE) index obtained via a combination of hyperspectral and thermal imaging, is proposed. Incorporating iTE along with other drought-related variables in selection criteria will allow the identification of accessions with diverse tolerance mechanisms. A comprehensive approach that merges high-throughput phenotyping and de novo domestication is proposed for developing drought-tolerant prebreeding material and providing breeders with access to gene pools containing unexplored drought tolerance mechanisms.

Plant phenotyping relevance

ハイパースペクトル・熱画像から画像ベース蒸散効率指標（iTE）を抽出する高スループット表現型解析が中心であり、乾燥耐性選抜への技術適用を提案している。

Code and data availability

This is a Viewpoints/Forum perspective paper. It re-analyzes data from Camino et al. (2019) for its iTE/Vcmax/CWSI figures, but the only availability statement is 'Data are available in the Supporting Information' with no public URL, deposit, or code repository provided in the supplied blocks. No paper-specific public,

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