Projects
Cereal Plant Phenomics: Data Generation from the APPF
The two-node Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF), to be established in 2007-2009, will provide state-of-the-art capabilities for plant phenotyping (offering controlled environments, field-based plant growth monitoring using high throughput robotics, automated imaging and computing technologies), integrated with the ongoing adaptation and application of emerging phenomics measurement technologies.
Up to 50 Tb data is likely to be generated annually from this facility. Existing automated phenotyping software developed for use on maize and the model plant Arabidopsis will be adapted for application to the study of cereal plants of interest in Australia, namely wheat and barley, both of which have phenotypic characteristics that are significantly different from those of maize and Arabidopsis.
Datasets for study by researchers at the PBRC will be generated for diverse sets of germplasm covering collections of wild, landrace and cultivated lines in addition to genetic populations, mutant populations and transgenic lines where particular genes have been silenced or over-expressed. For many of the lines, notably the genetic populations, additional datasets will also be available. These will include data from field trials covering yield and components of yield under a wide range of environmental conditions, maturity, and many other characteristics. Still further datasets will be generated from some of the groups in The Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) working with specific 'omics’ platforms. Some of these datasets, such as those from microarrays (transcriptomics), metabolite profiling (metabolomics) and protein analysis (proteomics), will be large and highly complex.
A major challenge facing researchers in the PBRC will be to combine the datasets and to explore methods to extract information from diverse datasets. The ultimate objective is to use the information to develop models for a plants response to environmental and developmental stimuli that can be traced back to specific biochemical or molecular events.