The National Plant Phenomics Centre
Plant breeding relies on observing differences in the way plants grow, identifying the desirable characteristics or traits, such as harvestable yield, drought tolerance or nutritional quality, and understanding how these traits are controlled by genetic and environmental influences.
The National Plant Phenomics Centre is a state-of-the-art facility that brings together biologists, engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians to investigate how genes and the environment interact and give rise to characteristics (or phenotypes) of different plants.
Our controlled environment glasshouses, high-throughput automated growing facilities and field monitoring drones, coupled with multispectral imaging, robotics, and machine learning (a branch of artificial intelligence) allow IBERS researchers to apply 21st century technology onto a hundred years of experience of grassland science and plant breeding.
“Looking at plants with a new set of eyes.”
For much of human history many of the traits used in plant breeding have been selected by eye. Digital imaging technologies now enable plant breeders to observe plants with a hundred different eyes. For example, eyes that can see in multiple spectrums, give a birds-eye view over fields, see through plant tissues and even through the soil to observe how root structures grow.
Use of the latest imaging technology coupled with machine learning, enables IBERS researchers to capture a vast array of imaging data from large numbers of plants in a short space of time. Such technologies facilitate work to be done in months that would previously have taken many years using traditional plant breeding approaches.
Developmental stages during the life of a plant can be captured, in three dimensions, and changes modelled over time. This allows a whole new range of traits to be measured that have previously been inaccessible to plant scientists and breeders. The phenomics centre therefore carries out research that furthers our fundamental knowledge of plant science, speeds up crop breeding and builds datasets that can be applied to multiple crops and used to develop new machine learning systems and AI applications to further accelerate progress.
➡ Find out more about Phenomics at IBERS.
➡ Find out more about the National Plant Phenomics Centre and its history here.