Whole plant phenotyping with the Plantarray

Plantarray is a fully automated, multi-sensor gravimetric-based platform that directly measures physiological traits, so scientists, breeders and researchers can quickly and easily perform a simultaneous performance analysis of the whole plant.

The system measures plant transpiration, biomass accumulation, water and nutrient use efficiency, key physiological traits activity and the environment, in order to conclude how productive the plant is under various environmental conditions. Within few weeks only, the system helps achieve deep insights into plant-environment interactions, and efficiently select the right plants and conditions that contribute to better yields and stress response.

Key Benefits

Intelligent Plant-Environment Screening & Diagnostics

• Fully automated, hands-free
• Physiology profile
• Whole plant, root, shoot and the environment
• Accelerate research with real-time measurements
• Unique feedback-based irrigation and fertigation control
• Suitable to most plants, soil types and growth stages
• Unique features for drought stress experiments and plant resilience
• Quantitative, definite, trustable results in high correlation to field results
• Enhance research with high-resolution continuous, simultaneous measurements of all the plants in the array. Resulting in identifying very small changes in plant response before the eye or image are able to spot it

More than meets the eyes: discovering the underlying secrets of plants performance

The Plantarray provides high-resolution accurate and consistent results. Each plant is an exact repetition by itself and receives personal and accurate treatment, which is maintained with the help of a feedback mechanism throughout the whole experiment. Plantarray detects plants reactions long before we know how to recognize them visually. The information obtained from the Plantarray system and the way the information is instantly analyzed brings to meaningful conclusions.
Plantarray provides clear understanding on the impact of environmental stresses and what occurs in the plant level under specific growing conditions.

Short overview video of the gantry with thermal camera and PhenoSpex dual scan Planteyes over the Plantarray system:

“In the TKI project ‘Faster breeding of new crops for high quality nutrition: quinoa as example and target crop’, we develop – amongst others – high throughput phenotyping systems to evaluate productivity and abiotic stress responses in the field and advanced greenhouse facilities to come to better selection tools. An important target is faster initial growth and a higher final grain yield with high protein content.”

“In April 2021 we have started to use the new NPEC (Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Centre) facility in Wageningen for measuring plant growth and transpiration at a very high resolution both in time and space. Here you see the trial with quinoa in the PlantArray system. The system has 180 weighing scales on which pots are placed, here with 6 plants each. Each scale is attached to a cutting-edge controller and irrigation control unit. These units measure the weight of the pots every three minutes, and from that we can directly calculate the total water use and transpiration rate. Traits like water use efficiency and stomatal conductance can be derived from it. Further, the system has a mobile unit with 2 RGB camera (standard colours) that make 3 D pictures of the plant, so total leaf area and plant architecture can be measured and visualised.”

“The trial we do now is a drought stress trial in which we evaluate a mapping population of 160 plants plus the parents. The project is a collaboration between Wageningen Research and companies (Radicle Crops, Greenfood 50 (both from the Netherlands) and CClabs (quinoa breeding station in Ecuador)). Also Wageningen University is involved with a guest researcher (post-doc), a PhD-student and an MSc-student.”