Joint Research Activities
EPPN develops novel instrumentation for plant phenotyping
The overall goal of the Novel Instrumentation work package ws to provide the foundation for a novel generation of instruments allowing accurate quantification of phenotypic traits related to plant performance. During the course of the project selected instruments and methodologies were made available within EPPN to allow benchmarking of the novel solutions with reference to existing methodologies and experimental proof-of-concept towards the development of dedicated screening procedures for relevant plant performance traits within the existing EPPN infrastructure and within the framework of Joint Research Activities.
EPPN defines good phenotyping practise
The main objective of this work package was to define essential elements of phenotyping procedures able to:
- optimise protocols aimed at answering biological questions, from experiment design to data interpretation
- compare results and performing meta-analyses of data from different platforms and experiments.
The work package developed guidelines of Good Phenotyping Practice based on experience from integrated phenotyping platforms, technologies and IT. These guidelines will affect the decision on which set of data has to be co-registered in phenotyping databases in order to allow users access to relevant parts of the experiments.
EPPN develops structures for common information technology for phenotyping
Currently, many plant phenotyping databases and solutions exist and several state of the art analysis tools have been developed. However, a major problem is the lack of commonly accepted standards, ontologies or APIs which need to be defined to allow cross-site phenotyping approaches and most efficient use of resources. Furthermore, novel challenges are foreseen in the area of whole genome integration and novel image extraction algorithms.
