High-Throughput Phenotyping of Soybean Seed Morphology

Abstract

Seed morphology of soybeans can be variable, with sources of variation being cultivar, environment, and position on plant. Growers of food-type soybeans seek circular seeds, and to minimize variation in seed shape, to produce a more consistent crop. Measuring dimensions of seeds manually is time-consuming for some traits and impossible for others. It is known that average soybean seed shape of a cultivar has a genetic basis, less is known about within-cultivar uniformity. In order to validate the image-based method we developed, we screened 40 varieties grown under pennycress intercropping. After validating the method using this data, we investigated heritability of variation in soybeans with the same accessions.