DWARPH

DWARPH is a 3-year DFF Sapere-Aude project on aiming at automating duckweed growth and observation to perform experiment on plant biology at high-throughput.

Plants live in multivariate environments (light, temperature, etc.), ultimately constraining their fitness. Although “phenomics” upscales the measurement of fitness (i.e., the “response”), most work only considers a few environmental values. “Metaphenomics”, instead, integrates whole response “surfaces” (RSs)—over a range of environments—, providing novel insight into plasticity, specialisation and resilience. However, conceptual and methodological limitations have so far hindered the study of RSs. Our three-part project presents a novel paradigm to tackle this issue. i) We use duckweed, a tiny, fast-growing plant and develop an automatic miniature growth chamber that scores growth and can update itself. ii) We create an AI-inspired methodology that plans experiments in real time. iii) We describe the RSs of a genetically diverse duckweed panel to discover the structure and basic biology of RSs. Altogether, our project sheds light on unexplored aspects of plant biology.