High Throughput Phenotyping of Plants at BASF Plant Science.

Yield-enhancement is the most important breeding goal for many commercial crops. Yield is a genetically complex trait, involving many genes and many alleles per gene with all types of interactions. Progress in yield breeding is impacted both by the genetic complexity of the trait as well as by the limited natural genetic variation within the species. With an ever-increasing demand for food, feed and fiber a step-change technology is required. Functional Genomics promises to make that change possible by providing a better insight in the contribution of individual genes/alleles to the different yield components. This in turn allows the design of new synthetic alleles postulated to confer improved plant performance.  The bottleneck in this approach, however, is that all hypotheses on gene/allele action need to be confirmed by an improved phenotype.

Since the beginning of the century CropDesign (Ghent, Belgium) has developed TraitMill^TM, a platform to identify synthetic alleles conferring a significant yield increase in rice. TraitMill^TM is a high throughput assembly line set-up, comprising allele-design, vector construction, plant transformation, seed increase and finally population evaluation. Phenotypic evaluation is done in a well-conditioned greenhouse environment, involving robotized plant transport, electronic tagging of individual plants, digital imaging and proprietary image-analysis software, as well as statistical analysis of results.

Since CropDesign became part of BASF Plant Science in 2006, TraitMill^TM based gene discovery has been integrated with high throughput phenotyping platforms in other BASF Plant Science units: phenotyping in Arabidopsis at BASF Plant Science - NC (Raleigh, NC) as well as high throughput metabolic profiling at metanomics (Berlin, Germany). In addition to expression studies, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology this approach allows to elucidate the black box between gene sequence and phenotype, leading to understanding the mode-of-action of yield-enhancing synthetic alleles.

Details of this integrated approach for evaluating synthetic yield alleles will be presented as well as some examples of the Results. Product development with the synthetic yield alleles is done in collaboration with Monsanto.