A cost-effective and customizable automated irrigation system for precise high-throughput phenotyping in drought stress studies
The development of high-yielding crops with drought tolerance is necessary to increase food, feed, fiber and fuel production. Methods that create similar environmental conditions for a large number of genotypes are essential to investigate plant responses to drought in gene discovery studies. Modern...
| Autores principales: | , , |
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| Formato: | info:ar-repo/semantics/artículo |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2018
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12123/2697 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/authors?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0198546 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198546 |
| Sumario: | The development of high-yielding crops with drought tolerance is necessary to increase food, feed, fiber and fuel production. Methods that create similar environmental conditions for a large number of genotypes are essential to investigate plant responses to drought in gene discovery studies. Modern facilities that control water availability for each plant remain cost-prohibited to some sections of the research community. We present an alternative cost-effective automated irrigation system scalable for a high-throughput and controlled dry-down treatment of plants. This system was tested in sorghum using two experiments. First, four genotypes were subjected to ten days of dry-down to achieve three final Volumetric Water Content (VWC) levels: drought (0.10 and 0.20 m3 m-3) and control (0.30 m3 m-3). The final average VWC was 0.11, 0.22, and 0.31 m3 m-3, respectively, and significant differences in biomass accumulation were observed between control and drought treatments. Second, 42 diverse sorghum genotypes were subjected to a seven-day dry-down treatment for a final drought stress of 0.15 m3 m-3 VWC. The final average VWC was 0.17 m3 m-3, and plants presented significant differences in photosynthetic rate during the drought period. These results demonstrate that cost-effective automation systems can successfully control substrate water content for each plant, to accurately compare their phenotypic responses to drought, and be scaled up for high-throughput phenotyping studies. |
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