Phenotyping

Increasing Corn Productivity and Improvement Through Phenotyping

Meeting future corn production challenges and demands will require the development and management of corn hybrids that will perform well in spite of increased weather variability.  To address this challenge, an ambitious wide scale plant phenotyping (trait measurement) initiative was launched which will expand our understanding of the interacting roles of corn genetics with crop environments on corn performance.  Iowa Corn continues to leverage the corn genome to gain understanding of how the corn genes translate into traits, to improve our ability to get more productivity out of an acre of ground.

The key objectives of this research are to:

• Develop a public corn phenotype database to allow study of mechanisms by which genes interact with the environment to influence traits
• Develop new methods and devices to analyze the relationship between genetic, trait and environmental data to predict performance of plants
• Be able to predict the growth and yield of a corn plant given the genetic background and the environment
• Convert the corn genome sequence into functional knowledge

Three major initiatives in which ICPB include:

• Genomes To Fields Initiative
• North American Plant Phenotyping Network
• Agricultural Genome To Phenome Initiative