Future agriculture needs to become more sustainable. The ability of plants to resist adverse environmental conditions is one of the most important goals of plant breeding worldwide. To find the responsible genes that make plants more resistant, it is crucial to survey plant growth accurately. Dr. Michael Riemann of the working group Molecular Cell Biology (Prof. Dr. Peter Nick) in the Botanical Institute of KIT investigates new ways of plant growth analysis together with da-cons GmbH. They observe the early stages of rice grain germination and growth of the globally most important crop for mankind. Pictures taken every hour during day and night are transferred to the Large Scale Data Facility (LSDF) of SCC. Da-cons GmbH develops and optimizes algorithms for automatic analysis of the growing seedlings. In this way it can be investigated how different gene variations support the growth of plants exposed to salt stress.
da-cons, a spin-off of SCC, offers visualization and archiving solutions of big imaging data and is funded by Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst (MWK) in Baden-Württemberg and the Scientific Computing Center (SCC).
Authors: David Haumann (da-cons), Michael Riemann (KIT/BOTANIK)