Affordable phenomics: Expanding access to enhancing genetic gain in plant breeding

Abstract

Abstract Plant breeders need to evaluate large breeding populations rapidly and accurately to identify and assess genetic variation responsible for many traits, including yield, quality, resistance, and climate resilience. Although advanced molecular tools, including marker‐assisted selection, genomic selection, and gene editing, are being used to accelerate genetic gain in breeding programs, conventional phenotyping is still needed due to the polygenic and environmental interactions related to these traits. Unfortunately, traditional phenotyping at a large scale requires considerable resources and is often subjective, time‐consuming, labor‐intensive, and expensive. To remove the phenotyping bottleneck, the development of efficient and reliable systems for complex trait measurement is needed. Recent advancements in tools and technology are making it easier to collect phenomic data faster at greater resolutions, allowing for the characterization of genotypic lines across the growing season to evaluate performance under different environmental conditions. By combining multiple sources of sensor data, interactions between genotypes and environments (G × E) can be investigated and used to increase the rate of genetic gain and the efficiency of plant breeding programs. However, the hardware and sensors necessary to realize this vision are often cost‐prohibitive for plant breeding programs, and ancillary data management costs can create further barriers to entry. In this review, we outline existing affordable phenomics hardware, sensors, software, and platforms, as well as the challenges that exist to broadly and equitably adopt these tools.

Code and data availability

This is a review article on affordable phenomics. The supplied blocks contain no authors' phenotype datasets, images, analysis code, models, or supplements; all URLs cited (PySpectrometer2, TerraSentia, farm-ng, Raspberry Pi, etc.) are third-party tools/products, not paper-specific assets.

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