Austria: New high-throughput phenotyping platform at Vienna BioCenter Core Facilities (VBCF)

The PHENOPlant phenotyping platform is designed for non-invasive, morphometric and physiological high-throughput phenotyping of mid-size crop plants as well as Arabidopsis and is fully integrated into a state-of-the-art walk-in phytotron providing highly homogeneous plant growth conditions. The platform facilitates precise environmental simulations across different climate zones as well as controlled plant stress experiments. Cutting-edge sensors include multi-excitation PAM kinetic chlorophyll fluorescence, RGB, VNIR/SWIR hyperspectral, thermal and 3D.

Within the planned infrastructure, plants are transported on conveyor belts from the growth area to the imaging cabinets equipped with state-of-the-art sensors. The imaging units are physically separated from the growth area (two individually controlled phytotrons) facilitating the parallelization of measurements via a sample loop and thus improving the throughput, flexibility and sensor utilization.

The PHENOPlant project evolved out of the Austrian Plant Phenotyping Network (APPN.at) initiative, was funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and built by PSI (Photon System Instruments).

The infrastructure is operated by the Plant Sciences Facility of the Vienna BioCenter Core Facilities GmbH and available in a fee4service mode to national and international user from academia and industry.

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