Plant Phenotyping and Phenomics for Plant Breeding

Climate change is expected to have a drastic impact on agronomic conditions, including water availability, rising temperatures, precipitation, soil nutrients, and the incidence of disease and pests. The effects of these changes are complex, for example, excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has the potential to increase crop growth, yet yield quality may suffer. Or the decrease in water availability can severely harm crops and reduce yield. The creation, selection, and fixation of superior plant phenotypes better adapted to challenging environments is increasingly urgent. Until recently, crop improvement programs have been mainly used to enhance yield and product quality but they can be equally applied to furthering alternative objectives such as contributing to climate change mitigation and reducing the environmental impacts of farming. Climate change is a clear and dire threat around the world and we are already seeing its impact (longer dry seasons, high winds, and increased temperatures). One important strategy for crop improvement is to look for adapted germplasm (e.g. genebanks) that have evolved elsewhere, under similar climatic conditions to those in areas currently under stress. Once identified and obtained, the populations, varieties or species concerned can be phenotyped for different traits (e.g. metabolites, gene/protein profiles, and plant architecture profile) and the data evaluated using statistical and systems biology approaches. Plant phenomics offers a suite of new technologies to accelerate progress in understanding gene function and environmental responses. This will enable breeders to develop new agricultural germplasm to support future agricultural production. Understanding plant organisation is achieved through a synergy of hypothesis-driven and discovery-driven research. Strategic initiatives in bioinformatics and systems biology provide the foundation for the comprehensive management, analysis and integration of such heterogeneous datasets.


This Research Topic is aimed at researchers and professionals working in crop improvement programs (fruits, cereals, forages, legumes etc) where there is a component of phenotyping and Phenomics for marker identification. These topics will be addressed both at the plant and cellular levels, trying to cover all variables of interest for crop improvement. Ideally works submitted to this Research Topic will have a plant phenotyping and phenomics component for plant breeding. This includes: modelling, plant phenotyping, genetic mapping and phenotyping at the macro and micro level.