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Research article2018Peer reviewedOpen access

Affordable Imaging Lab for Noninvasive Analysis of Biomass and Early Vigour in Cereal Crops

Armoniene, Rita; Odilbekov, Firuz; Vivekanand, Vivekanand; Chawade, Aakash

Abstract

Plant phenotyping by imaging allows automated analysis of plants for various morphological and physiological traits. In this work, we developed a low-cost RGB imaging phenotyping lab (LCP lab) for low-throughput imaging and analysis using affordable imaging equipment and freely available software. LCP lab comprising RGB imaging and analysis pipeline is set up and demonstrated with early vigour analysis in wheat. Using this lab, a few hundred pots can be photographed in a day and the pots are tracked with QR codes. The software pipeline for both imaging and analysis is built from freely available software. The LCP lab was evaluated for early vigour analysis of five wheat cultivars. A high coefficient of determination (R-2 0.94) was obtained between the dry weight and the projected leaf area of 20-day-old wheat plants and R-2 of 0.9 for the relative growth rate between 10 and 20 days of plant growth. Detailed description for setting up such a lab is provided together with custom scripts built for imaging and analysis. The LCP lab is an affordable alternative for analysis of cereal crops when access to a high-throughput phenotyping facility is unavailable or when the experiments require growing plants in highly controlled climate chambers. The protocols described in this work are useful for building affordable imaging system for small-scale research projects and for education.

Published in

BioMed Research International
2018, article number: 5713158
Publisher: HINDAWI LTD

      SLU Authors

        • Associated SLU-program

        SLU Plant Protection Network

        UKÄ Subject classification

        Plant Biotechnology

        Publication identifier

        DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/5713158

        Permanent link to this page (URI)

        https://res.slu.se/id/publ/95065