Plant phenotyping facility

Progress in imaging and robotics technologies improves our ability to capture ever more and finer details of root morphology at high throughput. The bottleneck in most root phenotyping pipelines remains the realtime automated extraction of biological information from thousands of raw images.
 
In the UCL aeroponics platform, roots growing unimpeded can be accessed non-invasively. With backlight illumination, sharp images are produced on 1000 plants with a 2-hr time resolution. The short displacement of roots in one time lapse makes it possible to track the progression of root tips during more than two weeks. 

Thanks to our image analysis pipeline, we are able to assess the following root traits. This list is non-exhaustive and is in constant evolution as image analysis evolves.

- Maximum root length (cm)

- Primary root elongation rate (cm.day-1)

- Embryonic roots number (nb of tips)

- Lateral root density (nb of lateral.cm-1 of branched embryonic root)

- Root angle between 2 first pair of seminals (° or rad)

- Mean/mode/median diameter (embryonic roots, lateral roots & all roots, cm)

- Convex hull area (cm2)