ABSTRACT
Background Precise measurement of plant traits with precision and speed on large populations has emerged as a critical bottleneck in connecting genotype to phenotype in genetics and breeding. This bottleneck limits advancements in understanding plant genomes and the development of improved, high-yielding crop varieties.
Results Here we demonstrate the application of deep learning on proximal imaging from a mobile field vehicle to directly score plant morphology and developmental stages in wheat under field conditions. We developed and trained a convolutional neural network with image datasets labeled from expert visual scores and used this ‘breeder-trained’ network to directly score wheat morphology and developmental stages. For both morphological (awned) and phenological (flowering time) traits, we demonstrate high heritability and extremely high accuracy against the ‘ground-truth’ values from visual scoring. Using the traits scored by the network, we tested genotype-to-phenotype association using the deep learning phenotypes and uncovered novel epistatic interactions for flowering time. Enabled by the time-series high-throughput phenotyping, we describe a new phenotype as the rate of flowering and show heritable genetic control.
Conclusions We demonstrated a field-based high-throughput phenotyping approach using deep learning that can directly score morphological and developmental phenotypes in genetic populations. Most powerfully, the deep learning approach presented here gives a conceptual advancement in high-throughput plant phenotyping as it can potentially score any trait in any plant species through leveraging expert knowledge from breeders, geneticist, pathologists and physiologists.
