A. Junker: Automated phenotyping of crop acclimation capacity: towards integration, mechanisms and resilience

Astrid Junker is the Group Leader ‘Acclimation Dynamics and Phenotyping’ at the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) since 2018. Before this position she worked as a Scientific coordinator of DPPN and a Postdoc in Bioinformatics & SysBio at the IPK. She received her Ph.D. at the Martin Luther University Halle in 2009.

Her research works on the question: How do plants acclimate to climate-change? an focusses on ‘FAIR phenomicsdata management’.

In its natural environment plants continuously have to cope with short-term changes in environmental conditions such as light or temperature. It is known that, compared to constant environments, fluctuating conditions negatively impact plant performance and biomass production. Predictions of future climate scenarios foresee even more extreme fluctuations. Thus a detailed understanding of acclimation capacity is of utmost importance for securing yield stability. Furthermore natural variation in acclimation capacity will enable to identify novel breeding targets for the future.

We use automated high throughput plant phenotyping facilities (Junker at al. 2015, Tschiersch et al. 2017) to monitor architectural and physiological changes in crop and model plants in response to changing conditions (temperature, light intensity, water availability). We apply controlled-environment based  phenomics approaches to natural diversity and integrate dynamic whole-plant with molecular phenotyping through machine-learning based algorithms.

The implementation of a novel and unique plant growth and phenotyping facility at IPK will allow to extend these studies in a controlled and reproducible field-similar setup to enable the dissection of complex traits and to gain a deeper understanding of dynamic acclimation-related processes, especially in the context of climate change.

Authors: Astrid Junker, Henning Tschiersch, Dennis Psaroudakis (IPK Gatersleben, Acclimation Dynamics & Phenotyping), Andrea Bräutigam (Bielefeld University), Thomas Altmann (IPK Gatersleben, Heterosis)