9 Toward a Regional Field Phenotyping Network in West Africa
9 Toward a Regional Field Phenotyping Network in West Africa
Alain Audebert, CIRAD, France & ISRA/CERAAS, Senegal
Delphine Luquet, CIRAD, France
Vincent Vadez, IRD, Senegal & ISRA/CERAAS, Senegal
Daniel Foncéka, CIRAD & ISRA/CERAAS, Senegal
Ndjido Ardo Kane, ISRA/CERAAS, Senegal
Abstract
Phenotyping plays an important role in crop science and breeding programs. The accurate, rapid acquisition of phenotypic information on plants in different environments helps researchers explore the genomes’ inheritance and expression patterns and determine the association of genomic and phenotypic information and ultimately increase crop yields. Traditional methods for acquiring crop traits (e.g., plant height, biomass, yield, etc.) rely on manual sampling, which is laborious and time-consuming. Fortunately, technological advances are resolving the high-throughput phenotyping bottleneck. To optimize the benefit of breeding programs in West Africa (WA) on the sustainability and performance of cropping systems (considering climate change and agroecological transition) developing high throughput field phenotyping methods is essential. However, the establishment of this type of activity requires infrastructure, equipment, management, and most importantly, dedicated and trained staff. Also, new technologies like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have recently become an important tool for fast and non-destructive high throughput phenotyping. This technology is flexible, practical, and provides easy access to data and high spatial resolution. UAVs are powerful tools for phenomics and genomics studies. As such, CERAAS and its partners are developing a field phenotyping network in the West African sub-region—the general scheme of which is presented below.
Keywords: Breeding, Field phenotyping, High-throughput, Regional network, West Africa
Introduction
Crop production must double by 2050 to respond to predicted demands of the global population (Ray et al., 2013). To meet this demand, crop yields should be increased by 2.4% annually, but currently, the average rate of yield increase is only 1.3%, with yields stagnating in up to 40% of the land under cereal production (Fischer & Edmeades, 2010). To ensure improved agricultural productivity, developing new varieties that are well adapted to specific environments is one of the main avenues for agricultural research centers. An effective approach to achieve this objective is the design of marker-assisted breeding programs which requires scientists to better understand the connection between a plant’s observable characteristics (phenotype) and its genetic makeup (genotype). By establishing the connection between genotype and phenotype, it is possible to select high-yielding stress-tolerant plants and improve agricultural production to satisfy the requirements of the growing human population (Li et al., 2014; Thorp et al., 2015, 2018; White et al., 2012).
In the last two decades, genome sequencing of crops has proceeded at a rapid