Phenomics

What is Phenomics?

The Wikipedia definition of phenomics is: Phenomics is an area of biology concerned with the measurement of phenomes — the physical and biochemical traits of organisms — as they change in response to genetic mutation and environmental influences. The phenome being all the possible phenotypes of an organism and the phenotype being the observable characteristics of an organism.

Plant Phenomics

Plant phenomics specifically was defined by Furbank and Tester (2011) as:

"Plant phenomics is the study of plant growth, performance and composition. Forward phenomics uses phenotyping tools to ‘sieve’ collections of germplasm for valuable traits. The sieve or screen could be high-throughput and fully automated and low resolution, followed by higher-resolution, lower-throughput measurements. Screens might include abiotic or biotic stress challenges and must be reproducible and of physiological relevance. Reverse phenomics is the detailed dissection of traits shown to be of value to reveal mechanistic understanding and allow exploitation of this mechanism in new approaches. This can involve reduction of a physiological trait to biochemical or biophysical processes and ultimately a gene or genes."

Furbank R.T. & Tester M. (2011) Phenomics - technologies to relieve the phenotyping bottleneck. Trends in Plant Science, 16, 635-644.

Is Phenomics New?

The recent interest in phenomics has been in part due to the rapid development of the other -omics technologies: genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. The cost of these technologies has decreased enough to allow routine use, which has in turn led to a “phenotyping bottleneck”, a need to be able to better understand gene function and plant response to environment.

However, phenomics has been around for a long time and is fundamental to plant science. There are very few papers published by plant scientists that don’t incorporate some phenomics (e.g. plant biomass measurements). Precision agriculture is heavily dependent on measuring plant performance. Growers are increasingly using new technologies to measure plant growth and yield. Plant breeders are dependent on good phenomics in measuring yield and quality traits in new varieties.

Modern phenomics is simply using new technologies to do what was done previously with greater accuracy or with greater ease, and to measure aspects of plant growth and physiology that previously were not possible or were not possible with high throughput and precision.

Who Does Phenomics?

A whole range of people do phenomics, even if they don't call it that. Plant breeders, farmers, growers, agronomists, viticulturists, plant scientists, ecologists and environmental scientists all do phenomics in various forms.