Accelerated High-throughput Plant Imaging and Phenotyping System

Abstract

The complex web of interactions in biological communities is an area of study that requires large multifactorial experiments with sufficient statistical power. The use of automated tools can reduce the time and labor associated with experiment setup, data collection, and analysis in experiments aimed at untangling these webs. Here we demonstrate tools for high-throughput experimentation (HTE) in duckweeds, small aquatic plants that are amenable to autonomous experimental preparation and image-based phenotyping. We showcase the abilities of our HTE system in a study with 6,000 experimental units grown across 1,000 different nutrient environments. The use of our automated tools facilitated the collection and analysis of time-resolved growth data, which revealed finer dynamics of plant-microbe interactions across environmental gradients. Altogether, our HTE system can run experiments of up to 11,520 experimental units and can be adapted to studies with other small organisms.

Caloric restriction extends lifespan in a clonal plant

“…In particular, the effects of factors other than light intensity should be investigated, with the aim of seeing whether variation in these factors leads to a similar stretching of senescence trajectories. With specific reference to Lemna senescence, temporal scaling should be further studied with respect to known or suspected sources of lifespan or growth variation including temperature (Paiha, 2021;Wangermann & Ashby, 1951), parental age effects (Barks & Laird, 2015;Dutt, 2023), nutrient availability (Hayden, 2018), the presence and concentration of chemical stressors , carbon dioxide concentration (Zenir et al, 2023), and variation in the microbiome (Kose et al, 2023;Zenir et al, 2023).…”

Host-microbiome mutualisms emerge from community interactions among microbes

“…Duckweeds (Lemnaceae) are the world's fastest growing and smallest angiosperms (Bog et al 2019). Their rapid growth rates, coupled with their nearly entirely clonal reproduction through the budding of fronds (Landolt 1986;Ho 2018), facilitates measurements of host fitness at high replication in a laboratory setting (Kose et al 2022). In this study, we compared the effects of single microbial strains and 10-strain synthetic microbial communities inoculated onto sterilized L. minor plants.…”