Plant Biologists Welcome Their Robot Overlords

As a postdoc, plant biologist Christopher Topp was not satisfied with the usual way of studying root development: growing plants on agar dishes and placing them on flatbed scanners to measure root lengths and angles. Five years later, the idea of using detailed imaging to study plant form and function has caught on. The use of drones and robots is also on the rise as researchers pursue the'quantified plant'--one in which each trait has been carefully and precisely measured from nearly every angle, from the length of its root hairs to the volatile chemicals it emits under duress. Such traits are known as an organism's phenotype, and researchers are looking for faster and more comprehensive ways of characterizing it. From February 10 to 14, scientists will gather in Tucson, Arizona, to compare their methods.