Evaluation of Genetic Gain for Dynamic Traits Related to Water Stress Tolerance in Maize Using Nondestructive High-Throughput Phenotyping.

Breeding for water stress tolerance in maize is necessary to further advance the agriculture industry and to meet the demands of the future. High-throughput phenotyping is an important means to improving drought tolerance. This technology can monitor a set of important physiological and morphological traits in high temporal resolution, capturing a plant’s response to every environmental cue. In order to determine how traits related to water stress have changed among popular hybrids throughout the years, high-throughput phenotyping technology, handheld instruments, and laboratory assays were used to monitor traits like biomass accumulation, stomatal conductance, relative water content, and chlorophyll concentration in a set of 36 era hybrids. These hybrids were monitored in a well-watered and a water stressed block. While this information was simply used to observe the genetic gain for these traits across decades, monitoring secondary traits with high-throughput phenotyping will be beneficial for breeding water stress tolerant cultivars for target environments.