Laser Ablation Tomography: delivering high-throughput anatomical-scale phenotyping

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Food security represents a major global issue. Crop production needs to double by 2050 to keep pace with a global population increasing to 9 billion. This target is even more challenging given the impact of climate change and the need for agriculture to become more environmentally sustainable. Developing crops better adapted to climate change is essential. Advances in DNA technologies (termed genomics) are helping revolutionise our ability to develop crops better able to adapt to different environments. However, our ability to image the shape of (parts of) plants (termed phenotyping) represents a major bottleneck. For example, the shape and size of the cells that make up a root or leaf have a major effect on how efficiently a plant functions. However, it has not been possible for plant scientists to screen thousands of plants to detect differences in plant cell shape and size needed to select new improved plant varieties, to date. This project proposes to employ a revolutionary new type of imaging approach (called Laser Ablation Tomography or LAT) which has recently been developed in the USA that, for the first time, allows scientists to rapidly screen thousands of plant samples for variation in cell size and shape. LAT has many advantages over existing physical or optical sectioning methods. For example, it is much faster, easier and more precise than traditional hand sectioning methods and also provides 3D (rather than 2D) information. Hence, LAT provides unique opportunities to select crops with increased yield and/or resilience to environmental stresses employing entirely new cell shape-based reasoning. For example, we will use LAT to look at many biological questions of relevance to food security including screening new varieties of wheat for variation in the shapes and sizes of cells in roots, stems, leaves, flowers and seeds: and understanding how plant cells respond to water logging or bacterial infection.In order to maximise access and train researchers we will base the new LAT equipment in a specialised research building termed the Hounsfield Facility. This facility has an expert team of staff with an excellent track record of service supporting UK and European scientists using a related form of X-ray based tomography (termed CT) to image crops and other biomaterials. The expert staff will also explore other applications of LAT to study, for example, soil, food and biomedical samples. The availability of the LAT equipment will also be critical to early career researchers and establishing new collaborations between project partners with both industry and academia, thereby enhancing UK capabilities.