General information on the maize WIWAM phenotyping system.
The maize WIWAM, also named ‘SHRIMPY’ (System for High-throughput Recording and Imaging of Maize Phenotypes related to Yield), is an imaging robot designed for crops.
The system has a capacity of 156 plants. Like the Arabidopsis WIWAM, it is located in a controlled-environment growth chamber and provides for automated imaging and automated weighing and irrigation of plants according to a pre-set scheme, specific for each plant or group of plants. This may include fixed quantities of solution, or irrigation to a certain target weight determined by the requested soil humidity levels. The system is thus ideally suited to impose soil water deficit treatments. In contrast to the Arabidopsis WIWAM, plants are positioned in tables which are sorted in rows. The robot arm pushes the tables aside to create the required space in between the rows for the robot arm to locate a pot and lift it out of the table. The robot then takes it to the rotating platform of the weighing and irrigation station. For the imaging of plants, pots are taken to a designated area at the back of the growth chamber where plants are rotated in front of a RGB camera for multiple angle imaging. The acquired images are used for the three-dimensional reconstruction of plants and the extraction of quantitative growth-related traits. Experimental setups, experiment metadata and results are managed by PIPPA (PSB Interface for Plant Phenotype Analysis), the central user interface and database. In the Systems Biology of Yield group, the robot is mainly used to study the effects of mild drought stress on growth-related traits in maize.
{module Wiwam - maize - gallery}