Abstract
Heliaphen is an outdoor platform designed for high-throughput phenotyping. It allows the automated management of drought scenarios and monitoring of plants throughout their lifecycles. A robot moving between plants growing in 15-L pots monitors the plant water status and phenotypes the leaf or whole-plant morphology. From these measurements, we can compute more complex traits, such as leaf expansion (LE) or transpiration rate (TR) in response to water deficit. Here, we illustrate the capabilities of the platform with two practical cases in sunflower (Helianthus annuus): a genetic and genomic study of the response of yield-related traits to drought, and a modeling study using measured parameters as inputs for a crop simulation. For the genetic study, classical measurements of thousand-kernel weight (TKW) were performed on a biparental population under automatically managed drought stress and control conditions. These data were used for an association study, which identified five genetic markers of the TKW drought response. A complementary transcriptomic analysis identified candidate genes associated with these markers that were differentially expressed in the parental backgrounds in drought conditions. For the simulation study, we used a crop simulation model to predict the impact on crop yield of two traits measured on the platform (LE and TR) for a large number of environments. We conducted simulations in 42 contrasting locations across Europe using 21 years of climate data. We defined the pattern of abiotic stresses occurring at the continental scale and identified ideotypes (i.e., genotypes with specific trait values) that are more adapted to specific environment types. This study exemplifies how phenotyping platforms can assist the identification of the genetic architecture controlling complex response traits and facilitate the estimation of ecophysiological model parameters to define ideotypes adapted to different environmental conditions.
Highlights
Fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides used to mitigate the effects of climatic hazards had a large, positive impact on crop yields between 1960 and 2000 (Tilman et al, 2002; Foley et al, 2005)
The impacts of the integrated drought stress indicator (SFTSW) on the thousand-kernel weight (TKW) value, seed weight, and plant biomass are illustrated in Figures 3B–D, respectively
We revealed that LG5450HO displayed a balanced tolerance profile, SY EXPLORER was adapted to heat-stressed environments while MAS86OL was more adapted to cold-stressed environments, and MAS89M was adapted to nitrogen stress and water-stressed environments
Summary
Fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides used to mitigate the effects of climatic hazards had a large, positive impact on crop yields between 1960 and 2000 (Tilman et al, 2002; Foley et al, 2005). The current need to reduce inputs in agricultural systems while coping with the climatic uncertainty caused by climate change means that farming conditions have become more variable than they were in the late 20th century. A drought-tolerant plant is one that maintains growth and production during gradual and moderate soil water deficits, ideally without exhibiting protection mechanisms (Tardieu, 2011). Water deficit affects a large spectrum of plant functions, such as transpiration, photosynthesis, leaf and root growth, and reproductive development (Chaves et al, 2003), by impacting the underlying physiological processes (e.g., cell division, primary and secondary metabolism) (Tardieu et al, 2018). Drought tolerance is the result of integrated processes taking place at different timescales to produce a long-term impact on leaf growth and transpiration (Tardieu et al, 2018)
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