Septoria tritici blotch (STB) disease caused by Zymoseptoria tritici is one of the most damaging diseases of wheat causing significant yield losses worldwide. Identification and employment of resistant germplasm is the most cost-effective method to control STB. In this study, we characterized seedling stage resistance to STB in 175 winter wheat landraces and old cultivars of Nordic origin. The study revealed significant (p < 0.05) phenotypic differences in STB severity in the germplasm. Genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) using five different algorithms identified ten significant markers on five chromosomes. Six markers were localized within a region of 2 cM that contained seven candidate genes on chromosome 1B. Genomic prediction (GP) analysis resulted in a model with an accuracy of 0.47. To further improve the prediction efficiency, significant markers identified by GWAS were included as fixed effects in the GP model. Depending on the number of fixed effect markers, the prediction accuracy improved from 0.47 (without fixed effects) to 0.62 (all non-redundant GWAS markers as fixed effects), respectively. The resistant genotypes and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers identified in the present study will serve as a valuable resource for future breeding for STB resistance in wheat. The results also highlight the benefits of integrating GWAS with GP to further improve the accuracy of GP.

Background High-throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP) methods have the potential to speed up the crop breeding process through the development of cost-effective, rapid and scalable phenotyping methods amenable to automation. Crop disease resistance breeding stands to benefit from successful implementation of HTPP methods, as bypassing the bottleneck posed by traditional visual phenotyping of disease, enables the screening of larger and more diverse populations for novel sources of resistance. The aim of this study was to use HTPP data obtained through proximal phenotyping to predict yellow rust scores in a large winter wheat field trial. Results The results show that 40–42 spectral vegetation indices (SVIs) derived from spectroradiometer data are sufficient to predict yellow rust scores using Random Forest (RF) modelling. The SVIs were selected through RF-based recursive feature elimination (RFE), and the predicted scores in the resulting models had a prediction accuracy of rs = 0.50–0.61 when measuring the correlation between predicted and observed scores. Some of the most important spectral features for prediction were the Plant Senescence Reflectance Index (PSRI), Photochemical Reflectance Index (PRI), Red-Green Pigment Index (RGI), and Greenness Index (GI). Conclusions The proposed HTPP method of combining SVI data from spectral sensors in RF models, has the potential to be deployed in wheat breeding trials to score yellow rust.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) carrying commercially sold multispectral sensors equipped with a sunshine sensor, such as Parrot Sequoia, enable mapping of vegetation at high spatial resolution with a large degree of flexibility in planning data collection. It is, however, a challenge to perform radiometric correction of the images to create reflectance maps (orthomosaics with surface reflectance) and to compute vegetation indices with sufficient accuracy to enable comparisons between data collected at different times and locations. Studies have compared different radiometric correction methods applied to the Sequoia camera, but there is no consensus about a standard method that provides consistent results for all spectral bands and for different flight conditions. In this study, we perform experiments to assess the accuracy of the Parrot Sequoia camera and sunshine sensor to get an indication if the quality of the data collected is sufficient to create accurate reflectance maps. In addition, we study if there is an influence of the atmosphere on the images and suggest a workflow to collect and process images to create a reflectance map. The main findings are that the sensitivity of the camera is influenced by camera temperature and that the atmosphere influences the images. Hence, we suggest letting the camera warm up before image collection and capturing images of reflectance calibration panels at an elevation close to the maximum flying height to compensate for influence from the atmosphere. The results also show that there is a strong influence of the orientation of the sunshine sensor. This introduces noise and limits the use of the raw sunshine sensor data to compensate for differences in light conditions. To handle this noise, we fit smoothing functions to the sunshine sensor data before we perform irradiance normalization of the images. The developed workflow is evaluated against data from a handheld spectroradiometer, giving the highest correlation (R2 = 0.99) for the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). For the individual wavelength bands, R2 was 0.80–0.97 for the red-edge, near-infrared, and red bands.

Modern potato breeding methods following a genomic-led approach provide means for shortening breeding cycles and increasing breeding efficiency across selection cycles. Acquiring genetic data for large breeding populations remains expensive. We present a pipeline to reduce the number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to lower the cost of genotyping. First, we reduced the number of individuals to be genotyped with a high-throughput method according to the multi-trait variation as defined by principal component analysis of phenotypic characteristics. Next, we reduced the number of SNPs by pruning for linkage disequilibrium. By adjusting the square of the correlation coefficient between two adjacent loci, we obtained reduced subsets of SNPs. We subsequently tested these SNP subsets by two methods; (1) a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for marker identification, and (2) genomic selection (GS) to predict genomic estimated breeding values. The results indicate that both GWAS and GS can be done without loss of information after SNP reduction. The pipeline allows for creating custom SNP subsets to cover all variation found in any particular breeding population. Low-throughput genotyping will reduce the genotyping cost associated with large populations, thereby making genomic breeding methods applicable to large potato breeding populations by reducing genotyping costs.

Low-cost phenotyping using proximal sensors is increasingly becoming popular in plant breeding. As these techniques generate a large amount of data, analysis pipelines that do not require expertise in computer programming can benefit a broader user base. In this work, a new online tool Specalyzer is presented that allows interactive analysis of the spectral reflectance data generated by proximal spectroradiometers. Specalyzer can be operated from any web browser allowing data uploading, analysis, interactive plots and exporting by point and click using a simple graphical user interface. Specalyzer is evaluated with case study data from a winter wheat fertilizer trial with two fertilizer treatments. Specalyzer can be accessed online at http://www.specalyzer.org.