Physiological & Genetic Mechanisms Underlying Grain Yield - Development of Novel Phenotyping Methods

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Many of the world's staple crops including maize are approaching yield plateaus meaning that it will be necessary to exploit other means (both genetic & physiological) for continuing to make yield advances. Yield plateaus arise due to biological limits being reached, lack of useful genetic variation within the germplasm pool, or a combination of both. Overcoming yield plateaus will rely on creating novel genetic variation and potentially altering the biology underlying grain yield. In maize there are two potential targets for altering the biology underlying grain yield: (1) Increasing the proportion of the total biomass that ends up in the grain, which is referred to as harvest index. (2) Manipulating the length of the grain-filling period, which is the period of time between flowering and physiological maturity. The aim of the proposed research is to develop spectral reflectance-based phenotyping methods for these two difficult to phenotype traits: (1) physiological maturity and (2) harvest index. Currently phenotyping these two attributes is highly labour intensive and requires destructive sampling of the plants, which makes it impossible to phenotype in a high-throughput manner. To overcome the current phenotyping challenges, we are proposing to utilize a spectral reflectance based approach for determining when a genotype is approaching physiological maturity and for determining the biomass at physiological maturity. The biomass at physiological maturity will then be combined with machine harvestable grain weight to generated HI estimates. By being able to phenotype physiological maturity and HI efficiently we can then examine the genetics governing the traits, identify novel genetic variation for them, and examine how genotype-by-environment (GxE) influences them. While this research proposal involves maize, the approach and concepts are applicable to all crop species.