Drought is one of the major abiotic stresses in agriculture affecting major crops worldwide. Any step taken towards improvement of either crops or its growing conditions which enables the crop to produce comparable yield with less water will help substantially to combat this problem. Water regulating gel-like growth substrate called PRS claims to improve the water use of the plants and helps them to grow better and bigger with less water. To test this claim, we used two crops Pepper and Ficus to grow in pot system with and without PRS. To monitor their growth variation with detailed and precision phenotyping we used the high-throughput, non-destructive digital phenotyping platform- PhenoFab®. The continuous growth information enabled capturing of minor growth variations seen in the plants treated with and without PRS. Results reveal that no significant growth differences were found between PRS treated and non-treated plants, however the PRS treated plants needed 35% less water compared to the non-treated plants. Hence, PRS allows use of less water to grow plants.

As genotyping is becoming more of a commodity, the bottleneck in functional marker development is more and more shifted towards phenotyping. For this reason we invested in building a Crop Phenome Center at the KeyGene Wageningen facility at which we investigated various approaches for phenotype quality improvements. The KeyGene Crop Phenome Center focuses on a robust phenotyping platform in a greenhouse setup (PhenoFab) that allows for digital phenotyping as an approach to acquire more precise phenotypic data. The phenotyping is based on imaging technology and uses the potential of a track that moves all plants fully automated through the greenhouse compartment and scanning areas. The plants grow in individual containers and are photographed at pre-set points in time and from different angles. This approach was validated in various projects with diverse sets of crop plants and on both plant and root development. Data and conclusions of these experiments will be presented.