General information on PIPPA, the PSB interface for Plant Phenotype Analysis.
PIPPA, the PSB Interface for Plant Phenotype Analysis, is the central web interface and database that provides the tools for the management of the plant imaging robots in the Systems Biology of Yield group on the one hand, and the analysis of images and data on the other hand. PIPPA communicates with the platforms by transferring experiments created in the PIPPA web interface to the platform. Treatment and genotype information for each pot is defined in the database in order to ensure data integrity across experiments. During the runtime of the experiment, PIPPA retrieves weighing and irrigation measurements, environment data, error logs as well as images from the platform. Raw images are stored on a central shared drive accessible to both PIPPA and the platform. Post-processing (rotation/cropping/etc.) of these images is supported in PIPPA. Analysis scripts can be initiated in the PIPPA interface, and are set to run either on the web server (stand-alone version) or on the computing cluster (@PSB) for rapid result generation. Afterwards, the output of these scripts can be validated in the web interface by checking whether data fall within certain bounds or, for example, whether growth-related traits such as plant shoot area show an increase over time.
The data collected from both platforms and scripts are displayed in PIPPA by means of a chart-generating component which supports a number of chart types, as well as a zoom and an export-to-file feature. Data can also be imported from files into PIPPA or exported from the PIPPA database to a file to maximize its range of utilities.