Development and utilization of new generation phenotyping tools to analyse genetic determinants of nitrogen fertilisers use efficiency in bread wheat. – PHENOBLE

To match the increase in demand of cereals in the next 50 years, wheat yield has to be improved by 2% per year. This challenge will be met only if a new paradigm is built in wheat breeding and agronomic practices. Advances in crop productivity are related to the understanding of yield limiting factors and the development of strategies for future genetic improvement. This should be achieved through the advances made by searchers and breeders in two main areas: genotyping and phenotyping.
Notable efforts have been applied in recent years to develop numerous cost-effective molecular markers to construct genetic materials suited to the objectives of research programmes and more recently to sequence entire genomes. In spite of these efforts, there has not been much progress in the area of phenotyping, especially in field conditions which is required for the main agronomical traits.
Recent developments concentrated on plant phenomics as an emerging field that develops and provides tools such as technologies to:
- Characterize plant performance and the dynamics of plant structures and functions
- Design a high throughput evaluation of plants in response to desired environmental scenarios, including novel field techniques based on proxi-identification.

The precise measurements of phenotypic characters is of paramount importance to discover genes that explain such complex traits. Right now, the main development has been made in controlled environments as greenhouses and not in the field.
In this project named PHENOBLE, we propose to build a first platform adapted to fine and accurate phenotyping with a new set of tools. This platform will be dedicated to bread wheat and will aim to decipher the genetic factors involved in genotype x environment interactions regarding nitrogen uptake. PHENO BLE will aim to validate, adapt and improve available new phenotyping tools by evaluating a collection of wheat elite lines under different nitrogen fertilizer regimes.
The project will focus on nitrogen because it represents a very important target for economic, environmental and agronomic reasons. Nitrogen influences characters as leaf area, senescence, chlorophyll content or metabolites content that are among the ones that appear as possibly measurable by new generation phenotyping tools. The main outputs of this project will be not only validated phenotyping tools or platforms usable in breeding or genetics programs but a set of heritable phenotyping traits and markers associated. Acquiring rapidly and dynamically large data sets will able to efficiently carry out association studies that should allow at the end of the project to identify the main genetic determinants of a better nitrogen use efficiency. Both markers and tools will benefit to the scientific and breeding community.