Visualising growth and metabolism: from whole plant phenomics to biospectroscopy

In order to feed an ever-increasing world population, there needs to be a step-change in the way new, more productive varieties are developed. Monitoring of plant growth and composition is being transformed by new imaging methods. Nondestructive measurements mean that individual plants can be followed over time, giving new insights into phenotypic plasticity and developmental change. Focussing on the important crop plants sorghum and cassava, I will present unpublished and published results on how we are using whole plant phenomics and FT-IR and Raman imaging to analyse the costs and benefits of specialised metabolites, focussing on cyanogenic glucosides in Sorghum from our EMS-TILLING population. Ros Gleadow is an ecophysiologist interested in secondary compounds, who has been using the Adelaide phenotyping facility for her work. A recent publication of hers on this is: http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/02/18/jxb.eru526.abstract A description of the acyanogenic mutants and the TILLING project can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7652.2011.00646.x/abstract