Identification for surrogate drought tolerance in maize inbred lines utilizing high-throughput phenomics approach.

Zahoor A Dar,R H Kanth,Jagdish Rane,B A Lone,Sulaiman Ali Alharbi,Showket A Dar,Asif Iqbal,Shabir H Wani,Jameel A Khan,Mohammad Javed Ansari,Sapna Langyan,Ajaz A Lone,Marian Brestic,Saleh Alfarraj,Saqib Bashir

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0254318

Abstract

Screening for drought tolerance requires precise techniques like phonemics, which is an emerging science aimed at non-destructive methods allowing large-scale screening of genotypes. Large-scale screening complements genomic efforts to identify genes relevant for crop improvement. Thirty maize inbred lines from various sources (exotic and indigenous) maintained at Dryland Agriculture Research Station were used in the current study. In the automated plant transport and imaging systems (LemnaTec Scanalyzer system for large plants), top and side view images were taken of the VIS (visible) and NIR (near infrared) range of the light spectrum to capture phenes. All images were obtained with a thermal imager. All sensors were used to collect images one day after shifting the pots from the greenhouse for 11 days. Image processing was done using pre-processing, segmentation and flowered by features’ extraction. Different surrogate traits such as pixel area, plant aspect ratio, convex hull ratio and calliper length were estimated. A strong association was found between canopy temperature and above ground biomass under stress conditions. Promising lines in different surrogates will be utilized in breeding programmes to develop mapping populations for traits of interest related to drought resilience, in terms of improved tissue water status and mapping of genes/QTLs for drought traits.

Highlights

Modern agriculture is facing challenges of producing sufficient food [1,2,3] for a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 [4, 5]
For identification of drought tolerance, we used high-throughput phenomics (HTP) approach to determine various favarouble aspects which may enhance the yield besides disfavour the drought stress in maize inbred lines
It is evident from the figure that the plant aspect ratio for the inbred lines shows steep decrease in control as compared to several ups and downs in stressed pots with time, since the rate of increase in plant width is more compared to the plant height

Summary

Introduction

Modern agriculture is facing challenges of producing sufficient food [1,2,3] for a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 [4, 5]. In the past several decades, the major food crop production has increased considerably as a result of timely application of fertilizers and other inputs, improved farming practices [6, 7] and genetic improvement [8]. Despite increased food production, mounting human population leads to a continued gap between demand and supply of food grains [9]. Plant phenomics can play a major role in lessening this gap by providing large scale and high throughput phenotyping facilities for crop breeding. Yang et al [10] reported that advanced plant phenomics would facilitate efficient use of genetic data and eventually direct to novel gene discovery and enhanced crop yield and quality in the field. The recent technological support to bypass many hindrances to direct the extensive advanced methods for broad-scale phenotyping had led to data achievements and processing in the 21st century

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Discussion

Conclusion