Phenotyping system for assessing plant resilience to a warming climate

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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.