Drought and heat stress tolerance screening in wheat using computed tomography.

Abstract

Background Improving abiotic stress tolerance in wheat requires large scale screening of yield components such as seed weight, seed number and single seed weight, all of which is very laborious, and a detailed analysis of seed morphology is time-consuming and visually often impossible. Computed tomography offers the opportunity for much faster and more accurate assessment of yield components. Results An X-ray computed tomographic analysis was carried out on 203 very diverse wheat accessions which have been exposed to either drought or combined drought and heat stress. Results demonstrated that our computed tomography pipeline was capable of evaluating grain set with an accuracy of 95-99%. Most accessions exposed to combined drought and heat stress developed smaller, shrivelled seeds with an increased seed surface. As expected, seed weight and seed number per ear as well as single seed size were significantly reduced under combined drought and heat compared to drought alone. Seed weight along the ear was significantly reduced at the top and bottom of the wheat spike. Conclusions We were able to establish a pipeline with a higher throughput with scanning times of 7 min per ear and accuracy than previous pipelines predicting a set of agronomical important seed traits and to visualize even more complex traits such as seed deformations. The pipeline presented here could be scaled up to use for high throughput, high resolution phenotyping of tens of thousands of heads, greatly accelerating breeding efforts to improve abiotic stress tolerance.

Plant phenotyping relevance

X線CTによる穀粒形態・収量関連形質の高速抽出パイプラインを開発・精度検証し、高スループット表現型解析への展開を示した研究であり、方法が中心です。

Code and data availability

The article describes a CT-based wheat seed phenotyping pipeline (EarS algorithm) but provides no public dataset, image, code, or model deposit. The data availability statement reads 'Not applicable.', and the only supplementary file is a list of wheat accessions (not measurements or analysis assets). The FAO URL is ac

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