rosettR: protocol and software for seedling area and growth analysis.
BACKGROUND
Growth is an important parameter to consider when studying the impact of treatments or mutations on plant physiology. Leaf area and growth rates can be estimated efficiently from images of plants, but the experiment setup, image analysis, and statistical evaluation can be laborious, often requiring substantial manual effort and programming skills.


RESULTS
Here we presentrosettR, a non-destructive and high-throughput phenotyping protocol for the measurement of total rosette area of seedlings grown in plates in sterile conditions. We demonstrate that our protocol can be used to accurately detect growth differences among different genotypes and in response to light regimes and osmotic stress. rosettR is implemented as a package for the statistical computing software R and provides easy to use functions to design an experiment, analyze the images, and generate reports on quality control as well as a final comparison across genotypes and applied treatments. Experiment procedures are included as part of the package documentation.


CONCLUSIONS
Using rosettR it is straight-forward to perform accurate, reproducible measurements of rosette area and relative growth rate with high-throughput using inexpensive equipment. Suitable applications include screening mutant populations for growth phenotypes visible at early growth stages and profiling different genotypes in a wide variety of treatments.
Bayer CropScience NV, Technologiepark 38, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.|Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, 50829 Cologne, Germany.|Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences "From Complex Traits towards Synthetic Modules", 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.
Filipa
0000-0001-8559-5274
F
Tomé
Bayer CropScience NV, Technologiepark 38, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.
Karel
K
Jansseune
Bayer CropScience NV, Technologiepark 38, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.
Bernadette
B
Saey
Bayer CropScience NV, Technologiepark 38, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.|School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL UK.
Jack
J
Grundy
Bayer CropScience NV, Technologiepark 38, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.
Korneel
K
Vandenbroucke
Bayer CropScience NV, Technologiepark 38, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.
Matthew A
MA
Hannah
Bayer CropScience NV, Technologiepark 38, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.|DTU Biosustain, Kemitorvet, Building 220, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
Henning
H
Redestig
Growth; Image analysis; Leaf area; Phenotyping; R