Inauguration of Plant phenomics facility at CRIDA

Dr. S. Ayyappan, Secretary, Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE) and Director General, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) inaugurated high-throughput plant phenotyping platform facility at Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA), Hyderabad, on 1^st  July 2014. This unique state of the art facility has been installed under National Initiative on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) project launched by ICAR to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies to deal with climate change impacts on Indian agriculture.

The high throughput plant phenomics platform, allows quantitative, non-destructive phenotypic characterization of crop varieties and germplasm under defined environmental conditions. The system captures images of the plants exposed to different abiotic and biotic stresses such as water deficit, excess moisture, high/low temperatures, salinity individually as well as in combination at defined intervals during crop growth. The automated weighing and watering stations, allows to weigh the pots before and after watering, in order to administer various watering regimens to study, the effect of various forms of water stresses like drought (different dry down slopes), water logging and submergence. All weight and watering data is integrally logged together with all image based phenotyping data. The facility contains a conveyer system to move plants automatically into screening chamber (scanalyzer). The scanalyzer 3D system images sequentially in multiple camera units employing visible, infrared and near infrared light source at different growth stages of plants exposed to various abiotic stresses. The visible image data is corroborated with important morpho-physiological traits such as leaf area, chlorophyll content, stem diameter, plant height /width, internode length, growth rate, pigment concentration, tip burn, biomass, etc. Infrared images help to quantify temperature differences within leaves and between plants. Near infrared images are useful to understand water distribution within a plant. The Control software allows for monitoring & integrating all systems like Imaging /Image Analysis, Watering, randomising plants in glasshouse, linking plants to specific Imaging modes, switching lights on or off including defined environmental conditions.

Dr. Ayyappan highlighted the importance of investing on such state-of-the art high end research facilities for climate resilient agriculture. He appreciated the lead role taken by CRIDA for creation of such facility not only in Hyderabad but in other parts of India through NICRA. He complimented CRIDA scientists and staff for their dedicated work to keep CRIDA name high. Dr. A.K. Sikka, Deputy-Director General (DDG) Natural Resource Management (NRM), in his remarks emphasized the need to develop guidelines to use these facilities by all stakeholders. Dr. M. Maheswari, Director (Acting), CRIDA while welcoming the dignitaries briefed about the facility and explained a roadmap for its scientific use  in Climate Research with special refernce to multiple abiotic stress tolerance. Dr. B. Venketeswarlu, VC, VNMKU, Parbhani, senior officers from ANGRAU, directors of ICAR institutes located in Hyderabad graced the occasion.