Kim Kenobi presented at our April group meeting.
Wheat roots - shape and nutrient uptake efficiency
Kim Kenobi
As part of the ERC FutureRoots project, a large CT scanning facility,
the Hounsfield Facility, has been built on the Sutton Bonington campus
to look at root system architecture of wheat plants in the context of
nitrogen and water uptake efficiency. The 3D CT scans will be starting
to become available in the next month or so. In this talk, I will
present a statistical analysis of a preliminary 2D wheat root data set.
The wheat plants in the data set come from 9 lines, all of which have
been assessed for nitrogen uptake efficiency in independent field
trials. The wheat plants have been grown under low and high nitrate
conditions and the roots have been imaged. A piece of software called
RootNav has been used to extract various quantitative measurements from
the root systems, including total length of root, area of convex hull,
maximum width and depth, and numbers of primary and lateral roots. In
addition to these traits the software returns the coordinates of points
on spline curves fitted to both the primary and lateral roots. I have
used the information from these spline curves to define a distance
measure between two roots and used multidimensional scaling to obtain
shape variables. In the talk I show how linear discriminant analysis
reveals that there are substantive differences in the root system
architecture of low and high nitrogen uptake efficiency wheat plants,
and less emphatically between the different nitrate growth conditions.
Also, the shape variables derived from the spline coordinates emerge as
playing an important role in discriminating between the groups. This
evidence is encouraging in the light of the aims of the FutureRoots
project to identify 3D root system architectural traits that correspond
to improved nutrient uptake efficiency.