Phenotyping system for assessing plant resilience to a warming climate

这笔赠款将支持购买便携式表型系统，以深入描述植物生理水平的表现。它将支持处于不同职业阶段的多样化的研究人员团队，拥有充满活力的研究实验室，在植物表型鉴定方面的重叠研究兴趣，以及从分子生物学和(EPI)基因组学到生态生理学、遥感和生态系统分析等不同但互补的专业知识。当今研究快速气候变化影响的科学家面临的主要挑战之一是缺乏关于植物功能和形态状态的深入数据。这些信息对于从机制上理解植物在高温和干旱事件中的反应、在组学辅助育种中的开发、或预测生态系统对气候变暖的反应至关重要。因此，植物表型也成为验证高通量分子组学研究的关键，因此是选择和育种计划以及可持续农业的核心。所提出的便携式光合作用系统是一种高精度、中等吞吐量的仪器，对于以非破坏性的方式深入探讨光合作用特性至关重要。它将允许表征植物的光合作用表现、二氧化碳同化、碳代谢和碳分配。目前，申请者还没有最先进的便携式光合作用系统来进行这种分析。然而，这些设备将是对科学家及其HQP的关键投资，以推动UTM的研究走在植物研究的前沿，为未来前沿的跨学科工作奠定基础，并在UofT建立表型中心，以应对当前植物生物学的挑战。对这一设想的支持也反映在研究副主任办公室和经济和社会事务部对这一提议的财政捐助中。生物学部，资助总额达30,000美元。

This grant will support the purchase of a portable phenotyping system for in-depth characterization of plant performance at physiological level. It will support a diverse team of researchers at various career stages with vibrant research labs, overlapping research interests in plant phenotyping, and divergent but complementing expertise ranging from molecular biology and (epi)genomics to ecophysiology, remote sensing, and ecosystem analyses. One of the central challenges faced by today's scientists studying the effects of rapid climate change is the lack of in-depth data on the functional and morphological status of plants. This information is crucial for a mechanistic understanding of plant responses during heat and drought events, its exploitation in omics-assisted breeding, or the prediction of ecosystem responses to a warming climate. As such, plant phenotyping has also become crucial to validate high-throughput molecular -omics studies and hence lies at the very heart of selection and breeding programs and sustainable agriculture. The proposed portable photosynthesis system is a high precision, moderate throughput instrument, which is critical to probe deeper into photosynthetic traits in a non-destructive manner. It will allow to characterize plant photosynthetic performance, CO2 assimilation, carbon metabolism and carbon partitioning. Currently, there is no state-of-the-art portable photosynthesis system for such analyses available to the applicants. Nevertheless, such equipment will be a critical investment into the scientists and their HQP to promote research at UTM to the forefront of plant research, lay the foundation for future leading-edge interdisciplinary work, and establish a phenotyping hub at UofT to address current challenges in plant biology. Support for this vision is also reflected in the financial contributions for this proposal by both the Office of the Vice Principal, Research and the Dep. of Biology, amounting to a total of $30,000 in support.