Projects - L (Laura) Groenenberg MSc

Phenotyping 4 Profit (P4P) – breeding for disease resistance in plants

In the era of genomics, genotyping plants is no longer the issue. However, plant phenotyping (especially of diseased plants) is critically lagging behind. In this PPP six breeding companies – East West Seeds, KWS, Syngenta, Enza Zaden, Royal van Zanten, Henan Biological Breeding Center – and NAKtuinbouw team up with Wageningen University & Research to accelerate phenotyping research exploiting the new state-of-the-art research facility NPEC.

Current methods to assess diseases in plants rely on visual estimation by trained experts. This is time-consuming and subjective, making it expensive and difficult to quantify or compare between experts and evaluations.

In addition, many important aspects of the infection process and disease development cannot be observed by eye. Also, the latency period before disease symptoms are expressed can be very long.

Innovative, sensor-based methods for the detection and evaluation of plant diseases have been developed earlier. Their application to quantify disease and also to detect non-symptomatic stages of the infection has been demonstrated, but mostly on a small scale. Particularly, chlorophyll-fluorescence-based methods and multi/hyperspectral imaging provide a fast and non-destructive way of scanning plants for diseased areas. These novel methods will be applied in this P4P project to improve the monitoring of disease onset and will support timely decision of disease management in general. The P4P project will, together with the breeding companies involved, explore how these screening approaches can be applied to launch breeding programs in which large populations are screened on plant disease resistance and susceptibility.