Gaynor McKenzie
During seasonal commercial potato pollination programmes it is important to accurately phenotype the varietal parents. This process allows for the confirmation of identity and also to monitor attributes such as flower and pollen production in order to assess a cultivars performance as a pollination parent.
Each parent is assessed on a weekly basis for flower production using a scale from 1-9. In addition to this other phenotypic features such as flower and stem colour are also recorded. Previously this data has been recorded using the "pencil and paper" method with the data being manually entered into an excel spreadsheet for collation. This task would take and average of 30 minutes to complete per pollination wing. When all pollination wings are full this adds up to 2 hours per week not including the additional time required for manual data entry.
Use of Germinate Scan in this situation has resulted in greater efficiency and accuracy. Each parent is now barcoded and using my smart phone in conjunction with a blue tooth scanner I can quickly and accurately record flower number, colour and other phenotypic information.
Another fantastic feature of the app is the ability to take photographs using your smart phone and to tag that image with the barcode previously scanned. This feature allows me to photograph each parent many times over the season and instantly label each image with the corresponding barcode. This is such a valuable feature as it allows me to not only track parental material for QA purposes but it provides me with a record of images for each cultivar grown that can be compared over different seasons.
Germinate Scan allows me to phenotype, photograph and tag images in approximately 15 minutes per pollination cubicle. This is a 50% reduction in time spent on this task and the data export feature nullifies the need for manual data entry which again saves time and reduces input error.
I find the app so easy to use and beneficial that I have begun using it to photograph the Commonwealth Potato Collection with the aim of introducing some basic phenotyping over time.
