Plant Phenomics: from the genome to the biome

Over the last decade, plant biology has been presented with a unique opportunity to scale from the gene sequence to environmental responses, linked by the burgeoning “omics” tools available. The rapidly reducing cost of genomic sequencing, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics means that an understanding of structural / functional relationships from the cellular to the plant community level have become a major focus, particularly for advancing the fields of crop physiology and breeding. A range of sensors and machine vision systems have now been developed to provide detailed 3D information on plant structure, function and environmental interactions which can unlock the power of the massive and growing pool of gene sequence information available. This presentation reviews recent developments in plant imaging technologies for phenomic application in high resolution and high throughput and how these tools can be used to enable basic plant biology and crop breeding. The opportunities to apply a systems biology approach to plant biology through structural functional modelling and populating these models with phenomics datasets are explored in the move toward a revolution in digital plant biology.