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The two-day meeting was held at the University of Nottingham’s Sutton Bonington campus, and attracted over 50 delegates from UK and EU academic and commercial research sectors to discuss new developments of methods, sensors or phenotyping systems for the detection and prediction of nutrient deficiency, drought or disease in crops. The programme included 8 invited speakers (4 UK and 4 EU) as well as short talks by PhDs and postdoctoral scientists and a poster session. The conference began with an introduction and welcome by Malcolm Bennett of the University of Nottingham who presented the new Houndsfield facility at Nottingham for root phenotyping utilising x-ray CT image analysis. X-ray CT has not been used just for root phenotyping but also to better visualise, under high resolution, the development of soil-borne disease on undisturbed roots of crops, for example damping off caused by Rhizoctonia solani in oilseed rape. Our first invited speaker was Malcolm Hawkesford who provided new insights on the automated robotic field phenotyping platform at Rothamsted Research for monitoring plant growth and health. He talked about the combinations and use of different sensors including hyperspectral cameras (400- 1000 and 550-1700nm ranges), chlorophyll fluorescence imagers and two scanning lasers for 3-D capture mount ed on the field platform to monitor around-the-clock crop performance. At the moment the system is used pre dominantly for nitrogen-use efficiency screening of crop genotypes although plans are being laid to utilise it for pre diction of disease caused by foliar pathogens. Teething issues include data handling and analysis and seem to be common challenges to be tackled by most researchers in the field since data acquisition and capture are large for most systems in development. The majority of talks on the first day covered new methods or sensors for nutrient and abiotic stress, essentially, most aiming to develop low cost systems for utilisation in-field. Highlights included the talk given by Jose Luis Araus from the University of Barcelona who focused on spectroradiometric approaches for predicting maize performance under abiotic stress but also for leaf blight disease prediction tested under different environments in Europe. He was the first to mention the use of aerial platforms. Following on from him, Raghav Khanna from ETH Zurich (Switzerland) showed us their UAV laser platform capable of obtaining a detailed field model to form a 3-D point cloud thus extracting spatio-temporal variation of physical canopy cover to support decision making for precision agriculture. Francois Tardieu from INRA (France) really focused on how to make the most of your existing data by utilising Crop Models such as APSIM to test genotype responses in different environments and identify traits and genes for better resource-use efficiency in maize. The second day was the most interesting for the plant pathologists, as the talks focused on biotic stress caused by plant pathogens. The first session highlighted work on roots and root pathogens. Kersten Nagel from Julich (Germany) outlined new methods based on optical and dedicated electromagnet ic technologies, NMR and spectral iso tope including short-lived radiotracers for dynamic measurements of root growth and system architecture to link functional and structural traits for improved disease tolerance. Bruce Grieve from Manchester presented work on using novel but low-cost sub-surface sensors based on electrical impedance tomography to non-invasively detect development of soil-borne disease such as club root in the root bundle of Brassicas and its potential for use in screen ing by breeders. Matheus Kuska from the University of Bonn showed us progress on the use of chlorophyll fluorescence from cell to plant to improve our understanding on the interactions between barley and Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei. He used CF imaging at microscopy level to capture the infection process and relate this to disease development and resistance responses in barley tilling lines. Olubukola Ajigboye discussed the use of hyperspectral reflectance to differentiate genotypic responses to Zymoseptoria tritici in winter wheat. The results were from collaboration work between academic and commercial research organisations to develop canopy-based sensor signatures to support pre symptomatic Z. tritici detection and management. Whilst Paul Skolik from Lancaster University introduced vibrational spectroscopy as a potential technique for early Pseudomonas detection in whole plants. His talk was interesting as this is a technique previously used successfully in animal disease detection but not in plants. The day finished with an overview of chlorophyll fluorescence based on OJIP to detect disease in wheat and the validation of key fluorescence fluxes for selected necrotrophs, Fusarium and Oculimacula spp, the biotroph, Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici and the hemi-biotroph Z. tritici. There was much stimulating discussion between pathologists and physiologists at the conference, both in the formal sessions and, especially, outside them over a drink during the poster session. One very nice example from the posters which generated much interest was new work in Italy on using real-time PCR to validate optical sensors for the early detection of phytoplasmas in vines and geospatial tracking of the disease. I would like to thank BSPP for supporting the meeting which brought together plant pathologists and plant physiologists thus creating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations in the future aimed at addressing the major challenges of abiotic and biotic stress in crop production and agronomy.
Rumiana Ray University of Nottingham
