PhenoWell®—A novel screening system for soil‐grown plants

PhenoWell®—A novel screening system for soil‐grown plants

As agricultural production is reaching its limits regarding outputs and land use, the need to further improve crop yield is greater than ever. The limited translatability from in vitro lab results into more natural growth conditions in soil remains problematic. Although considerable progress has bee...

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Published in:Plant-environment interactions (Hoboken, N.J. : 2018) Vol. 4; no. 2; pp. 55 - 69
Main Authors: Li, Ji, Mintgen, Michael A. C., D'Haeyer, Sam, Helfer, Anne, Nelissen, Hilde, Inzé, Dirk, Dhondt, Stijn
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01-04-2023
John Wiley and Sons Inc
Wiley
Subjects:
abiotic stress
Agricultural production
Arabidopsis
Corn
Crop yield
Drought
Experiments
growth and development
Growth conditions
high‐throughput screening assays
Image processing
Land use
maize
nutrients
phytohormones
Plant growth
plant leaves
Rosette
Screening
Seedlings
Seeds
soil
Soils
Trays
Arabidopsis
growth and development
plant leaves
high‐throughput screening assays
soil
maize
seedlings
abiotic stress
nutrients
phytohormones
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Summary:As agricultural production is reaching its limits regarding outputs and land use, the need to further improve crop yield is greater than ever. The limited translatability from in vitro lab results into more natural growth conditions in soil remains problematic. Although considerable progress has been made in developing soil‐growth assays to tackle this bottleneck, the majority of these assays use pots or whole trays, making them not only space‐ and resource‐intensive, but also hampering the individual treatment of plants. Therefore, we developed a flexible and compact screening system named PhenoWell® in which individual seedlings are grown in wells filled with soil allowing single‐plant treatments. The system makes use of an automated image‐analysis pipeline that extracts multiple growth parameters from individual seedlings over time, including projected rosette area, relative growth rate, compactness, and stockiness. Macronutrient, hormone, salt, osmotic, and drought stress treatments were tested in the PhenoWell® system. The system is also optimized for maize with results that are consistent with Arabidopsis while different in amplitude. We conclude that the PhenoWell® system enables a high‐throughput, precise, and uniform application of a small amount of solution to individually soil‐grown plants, which increases the replicability and reduces variability and compound usage. The PhenoWell® system allows screening for the effect on soil‐grown plants of compounds added via irrigation and a wide range of environmental conditions, like drought stress and different soil types.
Bibliography:Dirk Inzé and Stijn Dhondt both are senior authors.
Ji Li and Michael A. C. Mintgen contributed equally to this work.
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ISSN:2575-6265
2575-6265
DOI:10.1002/pei3.10098