ISPG BBSRC Strategic Programme in grassland and crops for challenging environments see project 12844

This project offers UK plant scientists access to a number of automated or high resolution imaging platforms. A large plant platform uses robotics to deliver growing plants such as wheat, barley, oats and oil seed rape, to gravimetric watering stations and a series of high resolution imaging stations for non-destructive sequential recording of growth, physiological and developmental parameters. A small plant platform provides similar facilities for small plants such as the model plant Arabidopsis and seedlings. Ancillary facilities include high resolution photophysiology, seed phenotyping and molecular analysis. In conjunction with local expertise in biological image analyses provided by the Vision, Graphics and Visualisation Group in the AU Department of Computer Science the raw data and associated experimental metadata will be processed to extract trait data in a non-subjective highly quantitative manner that can then be related to the underlying genomic makeup of the individuals. The NPPC will utilise international data standards, database architectures and query interfaces appropriate for handling processed plant phenomics data. The raw data will also be stored and will therefore be available for future analysis either by the investigator or, after publication, by other interested scientists.