Phenotypic and genetic variation in the architectural responses of a C4 grass to drought stress
type: CreativeWork
description: Improvement of next generation C4 grass feedstocks is a promising avenue towards meeting the challenge of sustainably ensuring global food and fuel security in the face of climate change. C4 grasses are inherently resource use efficient, have a variety of food, fuel, and other industrial product applications, and already play a large role in global agriculture. Ideally biofuel feedstocks should be grown on marginal and potentially drought prone acreage to avoid displacement of food production. Therefore, next generation C4 grass feedstocks must be both highly productive and highly drought tolerance. Plant architecture provides a framework for finding a balance between these targets. Plant architecture is the organization of the plant body and enables the capture of resources, influences the local microenvironment, and ensures reproductive success. Due to its impacts on productivity and the maintenance of productivity in response to environmental stress, tailored modification of plant architecture is a focus of modern breeding efforts. Imaging techniques are widely used in modern crop improvement efforts to accelerate the detection of useful genotype-to-phenotype associations. Here we used Setaria viridis mapping populations as a field-based C4 grass model system for understanding plant architectural responses to drought stress. Various imaging techniques were applied with the intent of capturing aspects of plant architecture within specific nuanced contexts determined by choice of imaging field of view, point of view, and time frame. Imaging within these contexts constrained the physiological, anatomical, and developmental interpretation of the image outputs. First we show that canopy hemispherical imaging combined with light attenuation modeling is an effective means of detecting the same genotype-to-phenotype associations for aboveground biomass as laborious and destructive traditional harvests. However, hemispherical imaging was unable to resolve specific archite…
abstract: Improvement of next generation C4 grass feedstocks is a promising avenue towards meeting the challenge of sustainably ensuring global food and fuel security in the face of climate change. C4 grasses are inherently resource use efficient, have a variety of food, fuel, and other industrial product applications, and already play a large role in global agriculture. Ideally biofuel feedstocks should be grown on marginal and potentially drought prone acreage to avoid displacement of food production. Therefore, next generation C4 grass feedstocks must be both highly productive and highly drought tolerance. Plant architecture provides a framework for finding a balance between these targets. Plant architecture is the organization of the plant body and enables the capture of resources, influences the local microenvironment, and ensures reproductive success. Due to its impacts on productivity and the maintenance of productivity in response to environmental stress, tailored modification of plant architecture is a focus of modern breeding efforts. Imaging techniques are widely used in modern crop improvement efforts to accelerate the detection of useful genotype-to-phenotype associations. Here we used Setaria viridis mapping populations as a field-based C4 grass model system for understanding plant architectural responses to drought stress. Various imaging techniques were applied with the intent of capturing aspects of plant architecture within specific nuanced contexts determined by choice of imaging field of view, point of view, and time frame. Imaging within these contexts constrained the physiological, anatomical, and developmental interpretation of the image outputs. First we show that canopy hemispherical imaging combined with light attenuation modeling is an effective means of detecting the same genotype-to-phenotype associations for aboveground biomass as laborious and destructive traditional harvests. However, hemispherical imaging was unable to resolve specific archite…
author: Banan, Darshi
language: en
keywords: Plant architecture, drought, physiology, quantitative genetics
date published: 2020-03-02T21:58:23Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:45Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106244