Australia
October 21, 2024
Amy McEachern, Honour student of Prof Dani Way, Biology and Plant Science at ANU, and Zixiong Zhuang,1st year PhD student of Prof Dani Way (Alison Bentley, Bob Furbank, and Emi Tanaka), Biology and Plant Science at ANU.
PhD student Zixiong Zhuang and Honours student Amy McEachern, who are both based at the APPN ANU node, are conducting projects which focus on the biological responses of pre-breeding Australian wheat lines to climate change.
Their findings will help support the resilience of our farming sector and food security as levels of atmospheric CO2 increase and the climate warms.
APPN provides a range of infrastructure which students, industry and researchers alike can access to help collect important morphological and spectral data. This project makes use of the ANU Node’s Eucalypt glasshouse, which allows plants to be grown at elevated temperatures and CO2 concentrations.
PhD student Zixiong Zhuang explained that their projects need to grow and examine differences between wheat lines in current CO2 concentrations and temperatures, as well as under predicted future conditions of 800 ppm CO2 and a +5 ° C warming.
“We scan the plants with the Phenospex PlantEye to obtain a range of morphological and spectral data for each plant,” he said.
“We are particularly interested in digital biomass – an estimate of aboveground biomass. This dataset is complemented with measurements of stomatal conductance, photosynthesis and water use efficiency, which will be correlated with yield. We also plan to use APPN’s Leaf Analyser Software which can be deployed to count seeds for yield.”
So far, the pair have completed work for Amy’s honour’s project, by scanning 144 plants across six wheat lines.
“We have combined the Phenospex data with gas exchange data and first results suggest a positive correlation between Net Assimilation Rate (A) and digital biomass,” Zixiong explained.
“Work has just started on my PhD project, where we almost double the number of plants to 240 across 30 wheat lines. Next year, the number will be doubled again, to 480 plants!”
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