High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping – Data Acquisition, Transformation, and Analysis

The aim of applied plant biology has always been to understand how and why plants grow the way they do. In most cases, the target of research is to find correlations and dependencies between distinct factors of the biological system. Biologists often seek better measuring technologies to facilitate their research. To compensate for the invariably limited possibilities, they often developed tedious but nevertheless very successful methods of gaining and increasing knowledge about plants. Thus over long periods of time they produce exemplary results. These steps gradually create a more comprehensive model of how plants actually work and still form a broad basis of the majority of research. Nevertheless, it remains possible to gain deeper insights into “biological variation” and see how the newly discovered principles could be applied to a broad set of plants under differing conditions (light, soil, water, nutrients, plant genes, epigenetic plant history etc.).