This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Aswin Singaram Natarajan rolls a stem of wheat in his hands. It looks perfectly healthy, but the senior experimental scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, knows his eyes can deceive him.
A plant could look green and vital and still be losing—losing too much energy or losing too much water or filling its grain to ripeness too slowly. And while these weaknesses are invisible to the human eye, they're plain as day to the right instrument. "We use X-rays to see through our bodies to see our bones; similarly, there are things we cannot see that hyperspectral vision technology can see," said Singaram Natarajan.
Where our eyes see light as just red, green and blue, a hyperspectral camera splits it into hundreds of narrow bands. It sees wavelengths from 350 to 2,500 nanometers—a range more than seven times wider than the human eye can see, stretching from ultraviolet deep into the infrared. Each leaf reflects those bands differently depending on what's going on inside it, leaving a fingerprint the camera can read.
Singaram Natarajan is one of a team of researchers on AcceleTraitPlus, a CSIRO project aiming to put that technology at the service of Australian breeders by working to deliver more robust and abundant varieties of wheat for farmers. Among the traits the team is chasing are optimized photosynthesis and respiration. The former is how a plant uses sunlight and atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce sugars that fuel growth and, eventually, produce grains.
Respiration is the other side of the ledger: it is how much of those sugars a plant uses to keep its cells functioning and growing, particularly overnight when photosynthesis has stopped. A third trait, the rate of grain filling, is the process by which final grain size is achieved to sustain yield, and it might be the project's strongest result so far. Measured by hand, it means visiting a trial site 10 to 12 times over a season, plucking thousands of wheat heads, then drying and weighing each one.
Breeders are normally focused on yield, but looking at characteristics like this could reveal why one variety of wheat copes with difficult conditions like extreme heat or drought better than another, long before yield ever comes into question. This is a question the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) has been engaged with for decades. GRDC senior manager for genetic technologies (cereals) Jessica Hyles said GRDC was investing in this research to help breeders develop wheat varieties that could deliver higher yield potential, better water use and more reliable performance in tough seasons for Australian grain growers.
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