Development Of Automatic And Digital Extraction Instrument For Rice Yield-related Traits

Rice is one of the most important crops in the world. Excavating the greatest potentiality of rice breeding for high-productivity, drought-resistant, insect-resistant, salinity-resistant and high utilization of nutrition is always the primary target in rice breeding. During every rice breeding period, plenty of grain phenotyping parameters, such as total spikelets number per plant, filled spikelets number per plant, seed-setting rate, thousand kernel weight, grain length and grain width, must be extracted and evaluated since they directly determine rice yield. Thus rice yield-related traits evaluation is an essential step in rice breeding, genetic research and functional genomics research.However, the conventional methods of extracting these traits are still manual, which is time consuming, subjective, wearisome and lack-repeatability. The current extraction instruments and technology, such as seed counter, could not meet the requirement of rice yield-related traits evaluation, due to its low-level automation, inefficiency and single function. Modern plant breeding technologies are able to produce hundreds to thousands of new varieties daily, creating the impetus for rapid evaluation of plant materials to provide pertinent information prior to entering the next cycle of selection. The low efficiency of conventional traits evaluation makes it incapacitate for the increasing demands of evaluation speed.This article aimed to develop several digital technologies for the automatic rice yield-related traits evaluation. The main tasks in this article includes:(1) design of mechanisms for separating the filled spikelets and unfilled spikelets, in order to solve the key problem of automatic spikelets separation and non-residue, (2) design of a prototype system for rice spikelets image acquisition based on machine vision and automatic conveyor, to solve the key problem of multi-traits automatic extraction, (3) design of digital rice yield-related traits management system for implementation of rice traits systematic management and corresponding seed automatic packaging. Finally, based on these technologies, the engineering prototype for rice yield-related traits was developed, which contains PLC control and software procedures to supervise the whole system with a user-friendly interface. The relative error of traits observations were all less than 5%, and the efficiency of whole system was 720 plants per continuous 24h workday. Thus, the digital evaluation instrument can be used to determine the rice yield-related traits, providing four advantages over conventional method:objectivity, automation, high efficiency, and multi-function.Moreover, with the development of core technologies, the application could be extended and popularized to other crop, such as wheat, barley, and maize. This system not only complies with the trend of crop phenomics, but also accelerates the development of function genomics. In sum, the high-throughput facility, dubbed Seed-Evaluation Accelerator, using agricultural photonics to give plant scientists a tool to unlock the information coded in genomes.