Customer Success Story:
Taking Reproductive Heat Tolerance to the Field - A Quest for Thermotolerant Pollen Development
Virtual Amphacademy 2021
Learn how the Radboud University uses the Ampha Z32 to study thermotolerance of tomato pollen
Ongoing climate change is leading to an increase in weather extremes including heatwaves. These heatwaves can have disastrous effects on tomato production during flowering while breeding for heat tolerant cultivars can be challenging. By using less complex reproductive traits underlying the loss of fruit set under heat, mechanisms and genetic factors of heat tolerance might be identified faster.
Having identified the male gamete development as the most sensitive to long periods of relatively mild heat, the Department of Plant Systems Physiology at the Radboud University has been using pollen viability as their main phenotype for identifying heat-tolerant cultivars and tolerance mechanisms.
Martijn Jansen, Ph.D. student at this department has taken this knowledge to the open field in order to confirm earlier findings made in climate chambers and to identify new quantitative trait loci for heat tolerance in a natural environment.
Key learnings from this session:
- Get a better understanding of how heat stress impacts pollen development and as such fruit set under high temperature conditions
- Get ideas on what is and what is not possible to test in open field conditions
- See which results can be acquired when the capacity of the open field is combined with high precision phenotyping and genetics
