The design modularity of the greenhouses and climatic chambers allows various growth conditions for plant in order to mimic most of the environmental scenarios in the context of climate change. Climatic chambers are either equipped with conveyors in line with phenotyping cabins, used for large biological units and rhizotrons or devoted to the “small biological units” (ie seeds, plantlets, microbiological petri dishes) phenotyped in a cabinet (called “HTS”) where mobile cameras screen the culture zone. This HTS and its climatic chambers allow to phenotype, in addition to our 1800 plants/1000 rhizotrons phenotyped in greenhouses, thousands of seeds and more than four hundred plantlets daily.
A High Throughput Plant Phenotyping Platform (PPHD), located in Dijon (France), is under final stages of construction. It will provide the opportunity to apply well-characterized biotic and abiotic constraints to several hundreds of genotypes (thousands of plants) and to accurately measure a series of functional traits. Although it can also analyze plant architecture and plant/plant interactions (ie crops versus weeds competition for resource access and the consequence in terms of plant development), the PPHD is specifically devoted to plant/micro organisms interactions. It allows establishing/testing causal relationships between genetic markers and phenotypes related to plant performance under a range of environmental conditions, including those forecasted by models of climate change.
PPHD is constituted of a large building with S2 modular greenhouses and climatic chambers. These are equipped with conveyors belts to homogenize plant growth conditions and automatically bring plant units to the phenotyping cabinets. Six additional S2 greenhouses are used for growing plants (either in pots or rhizotrons) when they do not need to be phenotyped during their whole growth cycle. Phenotyping is based on image analysis (visible light, near infrared and fluorescence) which allows characterizing non destructively and automatically i) a large variety of plant species and specifically designed high throughput rhizotrons ii) seeds or microorganisms, plantlets.
The understanding of the genetic determinisms involved in plant/plant and plant/micro-organisms interactions and the progress in selection/varietal innovation that will follow offer a unique opportunity, today still underexploited, for designing sustainable agriculture with large eco systemic services.

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