Germany
November 25, 2015

The light tunnel houses a motorised conveyer system to transport plants through the unit which is typically between 4 and 10 metres long. The first section contains some 3000 white LED lights to condition the plants by simulating sunlight conditions with 10 different light intensity profiles at 255 light intensity levels from 250 to 1000 µmol m-2 s-1.

Plants take between 10 and 20 minutes to pass through the tunnel during which time they adapt to the constant light conditions. At the end of the tunnel, the plants are exposed to a 2 second flash from approximately 2500 high intensity red light LEDs delivering up to 5000 µmol m-2 s-1 - nearly four times more powerful than direct sunlight. This saturates the reactive centres of the plants and, using the Kautsky effect, the resulting chlorophyll fluorescence is captured using a specially developed camera system.

During the 2 second flash, the system captures areas of up to 0.7 m² with 100 images at 2 mega-pixel resolution, synchronizing to within 1 millisecond. The resulting images are then processed using the LemnaTec OS software which converts images into meaningful physiological phenotyping data, in particular chlorophyll fluorescence parameters.

Chief Scientist Marcus Jansen comments, “As we expand the functionality of our software, we will add more and more hardware options to our portfolio.  The light tunnel integrates with our 3D Scanalyzer to create a fully automated phenotyping system that provides detailed information on the whole plant quickly and easily”.

Website: http://www.lemnatec.de

Published: November 25, 2015