Sustainable food security and increasing availability of plant biomass for human nutrition and bio-industries is the key challenge for the coming decades. Plant breeding is an essential component to achieve this goal. On the other hand, crop yield is a consequence of several plant biological functions and its interactions with environment. To understand crop responses to environmental factors, plant phenotyping is highly important.

With vast progress in high-throughput genotyping including NGS and other automated genotyping platforms, the time and cost for high-throughput genotyping was dramatically reduced, whereas the precision in the process is significantly increased. But phenotyping as a requirement for gene discovery and functional genomics was lag behind due to inadequate technology for high-throughput data collection and analysis. Nowadays with significant improvements in multispectral imaging, spectroscopy, radiometry, robotics, drones and image analysis, precise high-throughput phenotyping for a large number of individuals under controlled conditions and even in the field became possible.  

Innovative plant phenotyping has developed novel non-invasive, often image-based, technologies to quantify structural and functional plant characteristics. The aim is to identify robust relationships between genotype and gene expression to increase plant production and yield, to improve crop efficiencies and resistance to stresses, as well as develop biomass as renewable resource and bioenergy applications. The challenge is the quantification of structure, function and quality of plants interacting with the environment across scales from leaf to field, in growth chambers and greenhouse using non-invasive technology in automated system, across vast agricultural fields using field vehicles and UAVs, as well as aircrafts and satellites. For the purpose of breeding this requires high-throughput analysis and data handling.

In this workshop we aim to address some of these technologies for plant phenotyping in genomics era.

 Why do we need plant phenotyping?

Plant derived products are at the center of grand challenges posed by increasing requirements for food, feed and raw materials. Integrating approaches across all scales from molecular to field applications are necessary to develop sustainable plant production with higher yield and using limited resources. While significant progress has been made in molecular and genetic approaches in recent years, the quantitative analysis of plant phenotypes - structure and function of plant - has become the major bottleneck.

Plant phenotyping is an emerging science that links genomics with plant ecophysiology and agronomy. The functional plant body (PHENOTYPE) is formed during plant growth and development from the dynamic interaction between the genetic background (GENOTYPE) and the physical world in which plants develop (ENVIRONMENT). These interactions determine plant performance and productivity measured as accumulated biomass and commercial yield and resource use efficiency.

Improving plant productivity is key to address major economic, ecological and societal challenges. A limited number of crops provides the resource for food and feed; reliable estimates indicate that food supplies need to be increased by quantity (50% by 2050) and quality to meet the increasing nutritional demand of the growing human (and animal) population. At the same time, plants are increasingly utilized as renewable energy source and as raw material for a new a generation of products. Climate change and scarcity of arable land constitute additional challenges for future scenarios of sustainable agricultural production. It is necessary and urgent to increase the impact of plant sciences through practical breeding for varieties with improved performance in agricultural environments.

The understanding of the link between genotype and phenotype is currently hampered by insufficient capacity (both technical and conceptual) of the plant science community to analyze the existing genetic resources for their interaction with the environment. Advances in plant phenotyping are therefore a key factor for success in modern breeding and basic plant research.

One of the current problems in plant phenotyping are the high entry level and maintenance expenses of new sensors and infrastructures. This prevents many research organizations from implementing urgently needed approaches due to lack of investment budget and technical personnel. Therefore, affordable phenotyping concepts and methods need to be disseminated to a wider plant science and breeding community by identifying demands, increasing the awareness and collecting and sharing available knowledge on lean solutions (adopted from IPPN website).

Teaching Group:

Eligibility

This workshop is open to all graduate students, researchers, scholars and university lecturers in the field of biology, plant/crop physiology, breeding and biotechnology.

Language

The language of the workshop is English. Hence participants are required to have a good level of English understanding and proficiency both in listening and writing.

Costs

The registration fee for this workshop is 2,800,000 Rials which includes workshop materials and meals. Graduate students can be benefited from 50% discount in registration fee.

The registration fee can be paid through internet or bank transfer to the following account:

Account number: 217 391 900 1004

Sheba #: IR 77017 000 000 217 391 900 1004

Bank: Bank Melli Iran, Mesbah Branch

Beneficiary: Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute of Iran

Deadline for registration

The last day of registration is April 30^th 2018. For registration please download the registration form, fill it out completely and send it enclosed with the receipt of the registration fee via email to phenotyping2018@abrii.ac.ir.

Further information

For any further information about this workshop please contact Dr. Babak Nakhoda as the workshop Coordinator at +98 26 3270 3536 & +98 26 3270 9652 or email: b.nakhoda [at] abrii [dot] ac [dot] ir