Five reasons to use digital phenotyping when working with plants and seeds

Remote work: Recent measures to prevent spreading of the Coronavirus kept many researchers away from their labs and growth rooms. With automated digital imaging technology requiring only minimum staff present on site, plant research can go on and you can monitor experiments from remote.

Comparability: Having set a workflow for phenotypic analysis, all following analyses run in the same manner. Together with defined image acquisition conditions, this ensures that all measurements are comparable. Comparability overcomes bias due to personal impressions in visual scoring of samples. LemnaTec’s analytical software enables you to define your own workflows optimized to your specific needs.

Data availability: Visual scoring usually results in a note taken on paper or in an excel table, but the sample as such is discarded or changes properties over time. Thus, no re-assessments are possible. In contrast, imaging-based analyses can be re-inspected as all images are stored and linked to meta data.

Data diversity: Visual scoring normally records one or few properties of the samples, for instance, the germination percentage of a seed batch and the contingent presence of exceptionally sized seedlings within the batch. LemnaTec’s digital analysis delivers not only the germination percentage for a batch, but also root- and shoot-length for each seedling.

Throughput: Digital assessments – with, but also without mechanical automation – facilitate measuring more samples per time compared to manual work. Effects of operator fatigue are omitted, and operator time can be spent on interpretation rather than mere observation. In processes where many samples occur within a very short time frame, digital imaging can equalize the evaluation workflow, as image data can be analyzed in the background or once the peak time is over.