Tool for rapid phenotyping of grape pollen viability

Researchers of the ICVV have developed an image analysis tool that allows to evaluate the viability of grape pollen in a fast and simple way. Fresh pollen is stained using a standard stain and RGB images are taken. A macro developed for FIJI (Image J) allows to count the number of viable and total grains (viable and non-viable) of each image taken, and thus determine the viability of the pollen studied. The macro can perform the analysis of thousands of images contained in a computer folder without human intervention. This tool has been validated satisfactorily against the tedious manual counting, and has been used in the study of the existing diversity for pollen viability in a collection of grapevine varieties. The study has shown the existence of differences between varieties and even between clones of a variety, while no difference was observed between plants of the same clone, or between branches of the same plant or inflorescences of the same branch. In addition, different varieties showed different susceptibility to environmental conditions for this characteristic.

Tello, J., Montemayor, M.I., Forneck, A., and Ibáñez, J. (2018) A new image-based tool for the high throughput phenotyping of pollen viability: evaluation of inter- and intra-cultivar diversity in grapevine. Plant Methods 14. doi: 10.1186/s13007-017-0267-2.