Editorial: Plant Phenotyping and Phenomics for Plant Breeding

Abstract

A major challenge for food production in the coming decades is to meet the food demands of a growing population (Beddington, 2010). The difficulty of expanding agricultural land, along with the effect of climate change and the increase in world population are the current societal changes that make necessary to accelerate research to improve yield-potential and adaptation to stressful environments (Lobos et al., 2014; Camargo and Lobos). Increasing yields will require implementing novel approaches in gene discovery and plant breeding that will significantly increase both production per unit of land area and resource use efficiency (Parry and Hawkesford, 2010; Tanger et al., 2017). A critical component for accelerating the development of new and improved cultivars is the rapid and precise phenotypic assessment of thousands of breeding lines, clones or populations over time (Fu, 2015) and under diverse environments. The only reasonable way to satisfy all these demands is through acquisition of high-dimensional phenotypic data (high-throughput phenotyping) or “phenomics” (Houle et al., 2010). This approach may predict complex characters that are relevant for plant selection (forward phenomics), and will also provide explanations as to why given genotypes stands out in a specific environment (reverse phenomics) (Camargo and Lobos).

Keywords

Latin America; high-throughput phenotyping; forward phenomics; reverse phenomics; software development

Published in

Frontiers in Plant Science
2017, Volume: 8, article number: 2181

SLU Authors

• Ortiz Rios, Rodomiro Octavio

  • Department of Plant Breeding, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Plant Biotechnology
Genetics and Breeding


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2017.02181

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/92863