Welcome to the course

Welcome to the course

Hello and welcome to the PhenoDataCAMPP Introduction to Plant Phenotyping Technologies course.

This course is designed to take around 1 hour each week over 4 weeks to complete. It is aimed at bioscience/computer science/engineering professionals who are just starting to work in the area of plant science and plant phenotyping.

The course has been designed in a way that enables you to learn independently and contains all the content required to complete the course via self-study. There are also links to additional resources if you want to go deeper into the topic.

The course will cover some basic concepts to explain what a phenotype or trait is, what a genotype is, and types of data that we collect either in the glasshouse or field. We will also take you on some quick tours of the facilities available at the Universities of Lincoln and Nottingham, and show you several different phenotyping technologies.

The idea behind this is to provide you with some background and context to the more advanced modules in the PhenoDataCAMPP series. This means when you move on to, for example, the Introduction to image analysis course, you will understand a bit more about where the images have come from and what biological information can be measured from them.

The people behind the course.

Your lead educators are Oorbessy Gaju (University of Lincoln) and Jonathan Atkinson (University of Nottingham).

Oorbessy Gaju (Reshmi) is a crop physiologist at the Lincoln Agri-Robotics (LAR) focusing on using high throughput techniques to screen for phenotypic traits to improve crop yield. Her PhD was on identifying physiological traits affecting ear fertility in wheat, a joint PhD programme between University of Nottingham and CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre). Prior to joining the team at Lincoln, she worked at University of Nottingham and Australian National University (ANU) as a research fellow. She has worked on two BBSRC funded projects at Nottingham specialising on nitrogen use efficiency (NUE).

Jonathan Atkinson (Jon) is a plant scientist at the University of Nottingham specialising in plant physiology and the development/deployment of phenotyping equipment at the anatomical, organ, whole plant and field scales. His PhD focused on the genetic control of modern and wild ancestorial wheat root architecture. Prior to his current role specialising in phenomics technology, Jon has worked in several large multidisciplinary teams bridging plant sciences, computer science, mathematical modelling, and engineering on projects funded by both UKRI and the ERC.

We would also like to thank Sean Riley of Boardie Video Production for the video production itself.

Development and delivery of this course is supported by a UKRI Large-scale data training grant MR/V038850/1, “Data CAMPP (Innovative Training in Data Capture, Analysis and Management for Plant Phenotyping)”

More courses will follow over the next year to complement and extend this one, focusing on different aspects of data capture and analysis in plant phenotyping.

You might like to introduce yourself in the comments section below and let us know why you are taking the course, and what you are hoping to learn.