Phenomics: Approaches and Application in Improvement of Vegetable Crops

Increasing consumption of food, feed, fuel and to meet global food security needs for the rapidly growing human population, raise the necessity to breed high yielding crops that can adapt to the future climate changes, particularly in developing countries. To solve these global challenges, novel approaches are required to identify quantitative phenotypes and to explain the genetic basis of agriculturally important traits. These advances will facilitate the screening of germplasm with high performance characteristics in resource limited environments. High-throughput phenotyping platforms have also been developed that capture phenotype data from plants in a non-destructive manner. In this review, we discuss recent developments of high throughput plant phenotyping infrastructure including imaging techniques and corresponding principles for phenotype data analysis. Phenomics is a way of speeding up phenotyping with the help of high-tech imaging systems and computing power. It has been a practice in plant breeding for selecting the best genotype after studying phenotypic expression in different environmental conditions and also using them in hybridization programs, to develop new improved genotypes.