Abstract
Crop productivity can be expressed as the product of the amount of radiation intercepted, radiation use efficiency and harvest index. Genetic variation for components of radiation use efficiency has rarely been explored due to the lack of appropriate equipment to determine parameters at the scale needed in plant breeding. On the other hand, responses of the photosynthetic apparatus to environmental conditions have not been extensively investigated under field conditions, due to the challenges posed by the fluctuating environmental conditions. This study applies a rapid, low-cost, and reliable high-throughput phenotyping tool to explore genotypic variation for photosynthetic performance of a set of hybrid barleys and their parents under mild water-stress and unstressed field conditions. We found differences among the genotypic sets that are relevant for plant breeders and geneticists. Hybrids showed lower leaf temperature differential and higher non-photochemical quenching, resembling closer the male parents. The combination of traits detected in hybrids seems favorable, and could indicate improved photoprotection and better fitness under stress conditions. Additionally, we proved the potential of a low-cost, field-based phenotyping equipment to be used routinely in barley breeding programs for early screening for stress tolerance.
Highlights
Plant breeding has experienced an explosion of advances in the last 30 years, with the development and release of molecular, genomic, bioinformatic and technological tools and resources that accelerate crop improvement [1]
Measurements of chlorophyll fluorescence in the field are scarce [41,42,43] compared to those reported under controlled conditions, and the information derived from them has not been exploited by breeding programs [44]
ΦNO and leaf temperature differential (LTD) was positive, indicating that plants that showed a better crop status showed a lower proportion of the energy absorbed by PSII dissipated in a non-regulated way. Considering the latter relationships found under water stress conditions, and that leaf temperature has been accepted as a crop water stress indicator for a long time [60], we propose to investigate further a possible role of ΦNPQ and ΦNO as potential proxies for breeding for water stress tolerance
Summary
Plant breeding has experienced an explosion of advances in the last 30 years, with the development and release of molecular, genomic, bioinformatic and technological tools and resources that accelerate crop improvement [1]. Phenotyping represents the main bottleneck for effective selection of interesting genotypes. This is true for all breeding methods, but especially for the increasingly used genomic selection, for which phenotyping is key to train prediction models [2]. When following a genomic selection strategy, precision-phenotyping of the training population is most important, because that dataset provides the basis for developing the statistical model that is used to predict phenotypic performance in related members of a breeding population [3]. The rise of high-throughput phenotyping platforms (HTPPs) has enabled large-scale, rapid and accurate data collection under controlled and field conditions [4,5], but their impact on crop
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