Abstract
Image-based phenotyping is a non-invasive method that permits the dynamic evaluation of plant features during growth, which is especially important for understanding plant adaptation and temporal dynamics of responses to environmental cues such as water deficit or drought. The aim of the present study was to use high-throughput imaging in order to assess the variation and dynamics of growth and development during drought in a spring barley population and to investigate associations between traits measured in time and yield-related traits measured after harvesting. Plant material covered recombinant inbred line population derived from a cross between European and Syrian cultivars. After placing the plants on the platform (28th day after sowing), drought stress was applied for 2 weeks. Top and side cameras were used to capture images daily that covered the visible range of the light spectrum, fluorescence signals, and the near infrared spectrum. The image processing provided 376 traits that were subjected to analysis. After 32 days of image phenotyping, the plants were cultivated in the greenhouse under optimal watering conditions until ripening, when several architecture and yield-related traits were measured. The applied data analysis approach, based on the clustering of image-derived traits into groups according to time profiles of statistical and genetic parameters, permitted to select traits representative for inference from the experiment. In particular, drought effects for 27 traits related to convex hull geometry, texture, proportion of brown pixels and chlorophyll intensity were found to be highly correlated with drought effects for spike traits and thousand grain weight.
Highlights
Barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare L.) is one of the most important crops worldwide because of its multipurpose usage in human diet and as animal feed
The variance components for recombinant inbred lines (RILs) were the largest for traits describing main spikes (LSm, number of spikelets per main spike (NSm), number of grains per main spike (NGm), grain weight per main spike (GWm)) and larger under control than under stress conditions for all traits except 1000-grain weight (TGW) (Table 1; see differences in range of distributions shown in Supplementary Figure 1A)
Phenotypic correlation between conditions was very low for number of tillers (NTP, total number of tillers (NTT)); genetic correlation could not be estimated for these traits due to the presence of negative estimates of variance components
Summary
Barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare L.) is one of the most important crops worldwide because of its multipurpose usage in human diet and as animal feed. It is known to adapt to a wide range of environments, in Europe new cultivars have been bred under favorable conditions, which led to the narrowing of genetic diversity in agronomical properties, including resistance to environmental stresses like shortage of water. Success in breeding new varieties with improved tolerance to water shortage or heat can be achieved through the use of wild relatives, landraces or varieties growing in dry areas as donors of the resistance (Ceccarelli, 1994; Ceccarelli and Grando, 1999; Grando et al, 2001; Cattivelli et al, 2008). Water scarcity ( referred to as drought stress) is a condition associated with insufficient soil moisture available to provide satisfactory crop production. Many different approaches have been used to study the nature of plant reactions to defined levels of drought stress, including physiological processes investigations (Buschmann et al, 2000; Sanchez et al, 2002; Jones et al, 2003) and phenotyping on conveyor systems in glasshouses with controlled irrigation systems (Tuberosa, 2012; Honsdorf et al, 2014)
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