Know more

Carefully controlled crop irrigation is crucial for sustainable agriculture. In this respect, the development of drought-adapted plant varieties is desirable, but only possible if knowledge is available regarding differential responses of plants exposed to water deficits of variable duration and intensity. Moreover, plant degradability and plant agronomic properties (such as drought-resistance) are both crucial factors that depend on plant-growth development and variations in plant cell-wall composition. Therefore, it is the diversity of these responses that can serve to identify genotypes combining stable agronomic performances with good degradability under varying environmental conditions. We custom-developed an automated image processing and analysis procedure for quantifying the histological tissue-type pattern of maize stem sections using high-res colour-stained input images digitalized with whole-slide scanners.

Participants

• This research was national-fund grants coordinated by the French national research agency (ANR) under the S&T ‘Investments for the Future’ programme (ANR- 11-BTBR-0006 BIOMASS FOR THE FUTURE), LabEx Saclay Plant Sciences (ANR-10-LABX- 0040-SPS), and funding from the INRA’s CEPIA and BAP divisions.
• The specimens were cultivated at Mauguio in collaboration with the DIAPHEN platform.

Publication

D. Legland, F. El Hage, V. Méchin, M. Reymond. 2017. Histological quantification of maize stem sections from FASGA-stained images. Plant Methods, https://doi.org/10.1186/s13007-017-0225-z