A low-cost high-throughput phenotyping system for automatically quantifying foliar area and greenness.

Area of Science:

• Plant Science
• Genetics
• Agricultural Technology

Background:

• Manual plant phenotyping is a bottleneck in crop improvement due to time and cost constraints.
• Existing automated phenotyping systems are often prohibitively expensive and require specialized expertise.
• There is a need for accessible, scalable solutions for high-throughput plant phenotyping.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a low-cost, scalable, high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) system.
• To automate the measurement of foliar area and greenness in plants.
• To provide an affordable alternative for plant trait data acquisition.

Main Methods:

• A greenhouse experiment was conducted on *Brassica rapa* under abiotic stress.
• Images of hundreds of plants were collected hourly for over a month using a custom-built system costing approximately US$1000.
• Data from the HTP system was compared with manually acquired measurements.

Main Results:

• The HTP system produced similar estimates of foliar area, developmental trends, and treatment effects compared to manual measurements.
• Foliar area measurements showed good correlation between the HTP system and manual methods.
• Greenness measurements showed a lack of correlation between the two methods, indicating a potential area for refinement.

Conclusions:

• Low-cost hardware and freely available software can enable effective HTP systems.
• This HTP system has the potential to advance research on genotype-environment interactions.
• Future applications include investigating genetic loci for morphological changes under abiotic stress.