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To achieve the food and energy security of an increasing World population likely to exceed nine billion by 2050 represents a major challenge for plant breeding. Our ability to measure traits under field conditions has improved little over the last decades and currently constitutes a major bottleneck in crop improvement. This work describes the development of a tractor-pulled multi-sensor phenotyping platform for small grain cereals with a focus on the technological development of the system. Various optical sensors like light curtain imaging, 3D Time-of-Flight cameras, laser distance sensors, hyperspectral imaging as well as color imaging are integrated into the system to collect spectral and morphological information of the plants. The study specifies: the mechanical design, the system architecture for data collection and data processing, the phenotyping procedure of the integrated system, results from field trials for data quality evaluation, as well as calibration results for plant height determination as a quantified example for a platform application. Repeated measurements were taken at three developmental stages of the plants in the years 2011 and 2012 employing triticale (×Triticosecale Wittmack L.) as a model species. The technical repeatability of measurement results was high for nearly all different types of sensors which confirmed the high suitability of the platform under field conditions. The developed platform constitutes a robust basis for the development and calibration of further sensor and multi-sensor fusion models to measure various agronomic traits like plant moisture content, lodging, tiller density or biomass yield, and thus, represents a major step towards widening the bottleneck of non-destructive phenotyping for crop improvement and plant genetic studies.

Small‐grain winter cereal crops can be infected with Fusarium head blight (FHB) leading to mycotoxin contamination and reduction in grain weight and quality. Although a number of studies have investigated the genetic variation of genotypes within each small‐grain cereal, a systematic comparison of the winter crops rye, triticale, durum and bread wheat for their FHB resistance, Fusarium‐damaged kernels (FDK) and deoxynivalenol (DON) contamination across species is still missing. We have therefore evaluated twelve genotypes each of four crops widely varying in their FHB resistance under artificial infection with one DON‐producing F. culmorum isolate at constant spore concentrations and additionally at crop‐specific concentrations in two environments. Rye and triticale were the most resistant crops to FHB followed by bread and durum wheat at constant and crop‐specific spore concentrations. On average, rye accumulated the lowest amount of DON (10.08 mg/kg) in the grains, followed by triticale (15.18 mg/kg) and bread wheat (16.59 mg/kg), while durum wheat had the highest amount (30.68 mg/kg). Genotypic variances within crops were significant (p ≤.001) in most instances. These results underline the differing importance of breeding for FHB resistance in the different crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Dwarfing genes that are considerably reducing plant height are used in many cereals. In triticale, the rye‐derived dominant dwarfing gene Ddw1 was introgressed in commercial varieties. It has already been shown that this gene increases Fusarium head blight (FHB) susceptibility in one segregating population. We aimed for verifying this effect in the genetically unrelated doubled haploid (DH) population Cando (Ddw1) × Tritikon (ddw1), with 182 progenies in an experiment with artificial inoculation across six location–year combinations (environments). Linkage mapping was performed with DArTseq markers. The progenies significantly (p < 0.001) varied for FHB severity, plant height and heading stage with high entry‐mean heritabilities (0.85–0.98). The population showed a bimodal distribution for plant height. A significant QTL on chromosome 5RL was found for all three traits explaining 38%, 62% and 43% of the genotypic variation for FHB severity, plant height and heading stage, respectively, and most likely representing Ddw1. This gene increased FHB severity by 5.6 percentage points, delayed heading by 2.7 EC stages and reduced plant height by 29.6 cm on average. To use this gene in practical triticale breeding, the genetic background must be enriched with FHB resistance QTL to counterbalance the negative effect of Ddw1 either by introgression of major FHB QTL from exotic sources or by genomic selection within the adapted gene pool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]