Integrated Analysis Platform: An Open-Source Information System for High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping

High-throughput phenotyping is emerging as an important technology to dissect phenotypic components in plants. Efficient image processing and feature extraction are prerequisites to quantify plant growth and performance based on phenotypic traits. Issues include data management, image analysis, and result visualization of large-scale phenotypic data sets. Here, we present Integrated Analysis Platform (IAP), an open-source framework for high-throughput plant phenotyping. IAP provides user-friendly interfaces, and its core functions are highly adaptable. Our system supports image data transfer from different acquisition environments and large-scale image analysis for different plant species based on real-time imaging data obtained from different spectra. Due to the huge amount of data to manage, we utilized a common data structure for efficient storage and organization of data for both input data and result data. We implemented a block-based method for automated image processing to extract a representative list of plant phenotypic traits. We also provide tools for build-in data plotting and result export. For validation of IAP, we performed an example experiment that contains 33 maize (Zea mays ‘Fernandez’) plants, which were grown for 9 weeks in an automated greenhouse with nondestructive imaging. Subsequently, the image data were subjected to automated analysis with the maize pipeline implemented in our system. We found that the computed digital volume and number of leaves correlate with our manually measured data in high accuracy up to 0.98 and 0.95, respectively. In summary, IAP provides a multiple set of functionalities for import/export, management, and automated analysis of high-throughput plant phenotyping data, and its analysis results are highly reliable.Plant bioinformatics faces the challenge of integrating information from the related “omics” fields to elucidate the functional relationship between genotype and observed phenotype (Edwards and Batley, 2004), known as the genotype-phenotype map (Houle et al., 2010). One of the main obstacles is our currently limited ability of systemic depiction and quantification of plant phenotypes, representing the so-called phenotyping bottleneck phenomenon (Furbank and Tester, 2011). To get a comprehensive genotype-phenotype map, more accurate and precise phenotyping strategies are required to empower high-resolution linkage mapping and genome-wide association studies in order to uncover underlying genetic variants associated with complex phenotypic traits, which aim to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of cultivars in plant breeding (Cobb et al., 2013). In the era of phenomics, automatic high-throughput phenotyping in a noninvasive manner is applied to identify and quantify plant phenotypic traits. Plants are bred in fully automated greenhouses under predefined environmental conditions with controlled temperature, watering, and humidity. To meet the demand of data access, exchange, and sharing, several phenomics-related projects in the context of several consortia have been launched, such as the International Plant Phenotyping Network (http://www.plantphenomics.com/), the European Plant Phenotyping Network (http://www.plant-phenotyping-network.eu/), and the German Plant Phenotyping Network (http://www.dppn.de/).Thanks to the development of new imaging and transport systems, various automated or semiautomated high-throughput plant phenotyping systems are being developed and used to examine plant function and performance under controlled conditions. PHENOPSIS (Granier et al., 2006) is one of the pioneering platforms that was developed to dissect genotype-environment effects on plant growth in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). GROWSCREEN (Walter et al., 2007; Biskup et al., 2009; Jansen et al., 2009; Nagel et al., 2012) was designed for rapid optical phenotyping of different plant species with respect to different biological aspects. Other systems in the context of high-throughput phenotyping include Phenodyn/Phenoarch (Sadok et al., 2007), TraitMill (Reuzeau et al., 2005; Reuzeau, 2007), Phenoscope (Tisné et al., 2013), RootReader3D (Clark et al., 2011), GROW Map (http://www.fz-juelich.de/ibg/ibg-2/EN/methods_jppc/methods_node.html), and LemnaTec Scanalyzer 3D. These developments enable the phenotyping of specific organs (e.g. leaf, root, and shoot) or of whole plants. Some of them are even used for three-dimensional plant analysis (Clark et al., 2011). Consequently, several specific software applications (a comprehensive list can be found at http://www.phenomics.cn/links.php), such as HYPOTrace (Wang et al., 2009), HTPheno (Hartmann et al., 2011), LAMINA (Bylesjö et al., 2008), PhenoPhyte (Green et al., 2012), Rosette Tracker (De Vylder et al., 2012), LeafAnalyser (Weight et al., 2008), RootNav (Pound et al., 2013), SmartGrain (Tanabata et al., 2012), and LemnaGrid, were designed to extract a wide range of measurements, such as height/length, width, shape, projected area, digital volume, compactness, relative growth rate, and colorimetric analysis.The huge amount of generated image data from various phenotyping systems requires appropriate data management as well as an appropriate analytical framework for data interpretation (Fiorani and Schurr, 2013). However, most of the developed image-analysis tools are designed for a specific task, for specific plant species, or are not freely available to the research community. They lack flexibility in terms of needed adaptations to meet new analysis requirements. For example, it would be desirable that a system could handle imaging data from different sources (either from fully automated high-throughput phenotyping systems or from setups where images are acquired manually), different imaging modalities (fluorescence, near-infrared, and thermal imaging), and/or different species (wheat Triticum aestivum], barley Hordeum vulgare], maize Zea mays], and Arabidopsis).In this work, we present Integrated Analysis Platform (IAP), a scalable open-source framework, for high-throughput plant phenotyping data processing. IAP handles different image sources and helps to organize phenotypic data by retaining the metadata from the input in the result data set. In order to measure phenotypic traits in new or modified setups, users can easily create new analysis pipelines or modify the predefined ones. IAP provides various user-friendly interfaces at different system levels to meet the demands of users (e.g. software developers, bioinformaticians, and biologists) with different experiences in software programming.