Affiliation:
1. Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Corrensstraße 3, 06466 Seeland, Germany
2. Pancreas Cancer Research Lab, Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technique, (CLINTEC), Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge SE 141 57, Sweden
Abstract
The non-invasive analysis of seeds is of great interest to experimental biologists and breeders. To reach a high varietal identity and purity of seed material, it is often necessary to access features of individual seeds via the screening of mutant populations. While near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and time-domain nuclear-magnetic-resonance spectroscopy (TD-NMR) are well-known in seed research and industry for bulk seed measurements, their application for individual seeds is challenging. Here we demonstrate how to overcome this limitation using a practical approach to cereal grains using oat (Avena sp.) as a model. For this, we generated a representative collection of oat seeds from the ex situ German federal gene bank, which includes wide variation in grain size, shape, and coloration. Next, we established a short experimental pipeline to exemplify how to improve the procedure for individual seed measurements. In its current state, the method is ready to use for the high-accuracy estimation of nitrogen (protein) content (R2 = 0.877), water content (R2 = 0.715), and seed weight (R2 = 0.897) of individual oat grains. This work introduces the combination of NIRS and TD-NMR as an efficient, precise, and, most importantly, non-destructive analytic platform for a high throughput analysis of individual intact seeds.
Funder
European Regional Development Fund
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Subject
Agronomy and Crop Science
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