Phenotyping system for assessing plant resilience to a warming climate

这笔拨款将用于购买便携式表型系统，以便在生理水平上深入表征植物的表现。它将支持不同职业阶段的不同研究团队，拥有充满活力的研究实验室，重叠的植物表型研究兴趣，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的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。这些信息对于了解植物在高温和干旱事件中的反应机制、在组学辅助育种中的利用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和可持续农业的核心。所提出的便携式光合系统是一种高精度、中等通量的仪器，它对非破坏性地深入研究光合特性至关重要。它将允许表征植物光合性能，二氧化碳同化，碳代谢和碳分配。目前，还没有最先进的便携式光合作用系统可供申请人进行这种分析。尽管如此，这些设备将是对科学家及其HQP的重要投资，以促进UTM的研究进入植物研究的前沿，为未来的前沿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。研究副校长办公室和生物系为这项建议提供的财政捐助也反映了对这一设想的支持，支助总额为$30 000。

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.