Deploying Fourier Coefficients to Unravel Soybean Canopy Diversity

PhD students from our group Johnathon Shook, Kyle Parmley, Race Higgins and PDF Dr. Jiaoping Zhang participated in this interdisciplinary work with Dr. Ganapathysubramanian's group in Mechanical Engineering department with Dr. Jubery (ME) as the first author. In this manuscript, we utilized Fourier descriptors to construct geometric measures of the soybean canopy outline from digital images of canopies, allowing visualization of the genetic diversity as well as a rigorous quantification of shape parameters.  This methodology will be useful for large scale morphometric trait phenomics. In this paper we describe shape parameters of a very diverse soybean collection of ~ 450 unique genotypes. Full paper can be read at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpls.2016.02066/full