Of beans and mosses – a broad range phenotyping story

Is the LemnaTec phenotyping technology actually suitable for my plant species? The story of a system initially acquired for bean research and stepped into the investigation of mosses:

Using LemnaTec imaging and image processing for seed plants is a success story since more than 20 years. However, our technology can do more – a recent customer example demonstrates using LemnaTec imaging and image processing in studies with mosses, belonging to the spore-propagated plants.

Researchers used a LemnaTec PL Scanalyzer, the predecessor of our current PhenoAIxpert Pro, for imaging moss plants to analyze their response to pathogen infection. In the analysis, fractions of green, yellow, and brown tissues served to determine disease severity. Combining the phenotypic traits with microscopy, biochemistry, and genetics, the study aimed to identify factors that control the plant-microbe interaction. The full story can be read in the original paper by Ortero-Blanca et al., 2021.

Coming back to the question whether such phenotyping technology is suitable for a particular species, the researchers initially run a study with beans using this type of equipment (Padilla-Chacón et al., 2019). Despite bean plants and mosses are not very similar in phenotypes, the phenotyping technology can cope with both, and of course, with a broader range of species. For the camera system and the software, it is not critical having a particular species, but the central issue is that the sample needs to fit in the view angle and focus area.