Collection of hundreds of data about growth of a plant is quite simple these days. Anyone who can rank such data properly can select the plant with the best genetic properties. Scientists of Plant Research International are collecting and interpreting all those data and this is considerably speeding up the breeding process of a new cultivar.
Finding new cultivars with an even better taste or with a better resistance to pests and diseases. This is the task faced by any breeder. In the past he mainly used his “breeder’s eye”, regularly scoring by hand how plants were doing: weight, number of leaves, architecture of the leaves, number of fruits, and all this at different points in time during the growth of those plants.
Automatic data collection
This so-called phenotyping can meanwhile be carried out fully automatically. A computerised camera set-up is, e.g., moving through the greenhouse and is taking photographs at a given interval. Our mathematicians are converting the pictures into numbers, such as the number of leaves on a plant at a given point in time, the length of the plant, and the number of fruits.
Besides pictures, other parameters are determined such as plant weight or the presence of metabolites and proteins. And this is supplemented with information about the environment of the plant, such as fertilisation, amount of water and light. This results in a database of hundreds of data on various genotypes at various locations and in various years.
Searching for correlations
The next step is the statistical analysis of the relationships between phenotype on the one hand and genotype and environment on the other for which our scientists are using computer programmes. In doing so they are also establishing whether the correlations are biologically significant. When they are, e.g., searching for a better tasting tomato cultivar, the finding of a metabolite known for its sour taste is logical but a correlation between a certain gene and a metabolite that causes no taste sensations is less logical.
In this way our scientists can in a relatively short time select plants with desired properties and adaptations. This may - apart from taste - e.g. concern plants with a good tolerance to infestation by a pathogen or suitability for cultivation in a silt environment.
Still restricted to main crops
Currently, the method is still so expensive that it is mainly used for crops that are grown on a large scale, such as tomato. But it is expected that this rapid breeding method will in the foreseeable future become cost-effective for more crops. Registration and storage of data is becoming increasingly cheaper and processing methods are getting better and more general.