Heat stress tolerating crops are highly desirable to enable better farming in tropical and subtropical areas and to better cope with climate change effects. Analysing gene functions in heat stress responses, researchers used a LemnaTec Scanalyzer for biovolume and colour determination of tomato plants under elevated temperatures.

The digital phenotyping data helped to explain functions of the tested alleles in terms of growth responses under heat stress. Increased biovolume in some of the tested lines compared to wild type plants proved that the corresponding alleles enabled better growth under stress. The digital colour analysis was a measure for the thermosensitivity with shifts from dark-green to yellow indicate that a line was sensitive to heat.

Marko D, El-Shershaby A, Carriero F, Summerer S, Petrozza A, Iannacone R, Schleiff E, Fragkostefanakis S (2019) Identification and Characterization of a Thermotolerant TILLING Allele of Heat Shock Binding Protein 1 in Tomato. Genes 10 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/10/7/516

Technology used in this study: Conveyor Scanalyzer