Korean Journal of Agricultural Science ISSN:2466-2402(Print) 2466-2410(Online) 농업과학연구

The demand for crop production is increasingly becoming steeper due to the rapid population growth. As a result, breeding cycles should be faster than ever before. However, the current breeding methods cannot meet this requirement because traditional phenotyping methods lag far behind even though genotyping methods have been drastically developed with the advent of next-generation sequencing technology over a short period of time. Consequently, phenotyping has become a bottleneck in large-scale genomics-based plant breeding studies. Recently, however, phenomics, a new discipline involving the characterization of a full set of phenotypes in a given species, has emerged as an alternative technology to come up with exponentially increasing genomic data in plant breeding programs. There are many advantages for using new technologies in phenomics. Yet, the necessity of diverse man power and huge funding for cutting-edge equipment prevent many researchers who are interested in this area from adopting this new technique in their research programs. Currently, only a limited number of groups mostly in developed countries have initiated phenomic studies using high throughput methods. In this short article, we describe the strategies to compete with those advanced groups using limited resources in developing countries, followed by a brief introduction of high throughput phenotyping.