IDBR: TYPE A: Multispectral laser 3D ranging and imaging system for plant phenotyping

内布拉斯加-林肯大学(UNL)被授予开发一种多波长激光测距和成像仪，用于在整个植物水平上对植物幼苗进行表型鉴定。到2050年，世界人口可能超过97亿，生产足够的食物和能源是农业面临的最大挑战。与现代基因组测序技术相比，植物表型组学在能力和产量方面落后。这项研究开发的仪器将缓解这一限制，允许进行更有效的基因-表型分析，并最终加速作物改良(在产量和抗逆性方面)，以解决迫在眉睫的全球粮食安全挑战。该项目将营造一个合作的环境，博士后、研究生和本科生将接受植物生物学、生物工程和计算机科学方面的跨学科培训。该团队将开发课程材料，让传统植物生物学的学生学习传感、仪器和数据处理等新领域的知识(这是大学植物生物学课程中一个明显的空白)。该项目的发现将在植物科学和生物工程的国际会议上发表，并发表在同行评议的期刊上。该团队还将与UNL的植物科学家和世界各地的植物表型小组合作，广泛传播该仪器。该仪器通过激光成像可以同时探测植物的化学性质(如水分、氮素和叶绿素浓度)，通过激光测距可以测量植物的三维结构(如个体叶片的大小和空间方位)。通过这些测量，可以提取更多与植物生理和功能相关的参数(如光合作用和气孔活动)。所有参数都将在空间上共同配准，从而消除了繁琐的数据融合需求。将开发新的算法来处理海量3D激光点云，并重建植物的叶和茎表面。该仪器的性能将通过一系列涉及受压植物和健康植物的实验进行严格验证。综上所述，该仪器在植物地上部表型能力和产量方面都有了革命性的改进，这反过来将有利于许多基础和应用植物生物学研究领域。

An award is made to University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) to develop a multi-wavelength LASER ranging and imaging instrument for phenotyping plant shoots at the whole plant level. Producing enough food and energy for a world population likely exceeding 9.7 billion by 2050 is the greatest challenge facing agriculture. Compared to modern genomic sequencing technologies, plant phenomics lags behind in its capacity and throughput. The instrument developed in this research will alleviate this limitation, allow more efficient genotype-phenotype analysis, and ultimately catalyze the acceleration of crop improvements (in terms of yield and stress tolerance) to solve the looming global food security challenge. The project will foster a collaborative environment where the postdoc, graduate and undergraduate students will receive interdisciplinary training in plant biology, biological engineering, and computer science. The team will develop course materials that allow students in traditional plant biology to learn the new domain knowledge of sensing, instrumentation and data processing (this is a perceived gap in university plant biology curriculum). Discoveries from the project will be presented at international conferences on plant science and biological engineering and published in peer reviewed journals. The team will also collaborate with plant scientists at UNL and plant phenotyping groups around the world for the broad dissemination of the instrument. This instrument can simultaneously probe chemical properties of plants (such as water, nitrogen, and chlorophyll concentration) through LASER imaging and measure 3D plant structure (such as size and spatial orientation of individual leaves) through LASER ranging. Through these measurements, more parameters related to plant physiology and functions (such as photosynthesis and stomatal activity) can be extracted. All the parameters will be spatially co-registered, eliminating the need for tedious data fusion. New algorithms will be developed to process massive 3D LASER point clouds and reconstruct plant leaf and stem surfaces. The performance of the instrument will be rigorously validated through a series of experiments involving stressed versus healthy plants. Taken together, the instrument provides transformative improvement in both capacity and throughput for plant shoot phenotyping, which will in turn benefit many fields of basic and applied plant biology research.