IDBR: TYPE A: Multispectral laser 3D ranging and imaging system for plant phenotyping

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An award is made to University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) to develop a multi-wavelength LASER ranging and imaging instrument for phenotyping plant shoots at the whole plant level. Producing enough food and energy for a world population likely exceeding 9.7 billion by 2050 is the greatest challenge facing agriculture. Compared to modern genomic sequencing technologies, plant phenomics lags behind in its capacity and throughput. The instrument developed in this research will alleviate this limitation, allow more efficient genotype-phenotype analysis, and ultimately catalyze the acceleration of crop improvements (in terms of yield and stress tolerance) to solve the looming global food security challenge. The project will foster a collaborative environment where the postdoc, graduate and undergraduate students will receive interdisciplinary training in plant biology, biological engineering, and computer science. The team will develop course materials that allow students in traditional plant biology to learn the new domain knowledge of sensing, instrumentation and data processing (this is a perceived gap in university plant biology curriculum). Discoveries from the project will be presented at international conferences on plant science and biological engineering and published in peer reviewed journals. The team will also collaborate with plant scientists at UNL and plant phenotyping groups around the world for the broad dissemination of the instrument. This instrument can simultaneously probe chemical properties of plants (such as water, nitrogen, and chlorophyll concentration) through LASER imaging and measure 3D plant structure (such as size and spatial orientation of individual leaves) through LASER ranging. Through these measurements, more parameters related to plant physiology and functions (such as photosynthesis and stomatal activity) can be extracted. All the parameters will be spatially co-registered, eliminating the need for tedious data fusion. New algorithms will be developed to process massive 3D LASER point clouds and reconstruct plant leaf and stem surfaces. The performance of the instrument will be rigorously validated through a series of experiments involving stressed versus healthy plants. Taken together, the instrument provides transformative improvement in both capacity and throughput for plant shoot phenotyping, which will in turn benefit many fields of basic and applied plant biology research.