On March 9th Jennifer Zur from NPZ Innovation GmbH presented The Avatars Project at the GPZ/GPW & VDLFA Scientific Seed Symposium “Seed production in times of climate change” with 202 participants from 32 countries. In her presentation, she focused on demonstrating the “single seed to single seedling” analysis pipeline and understanding the challenge of introducing non-invasive new technologies for seed quality analysis. In AVATARS, the ISTA rules are applied to describe each genotype’s individual germination behaviour after accelerated versus natural ageing and to classify normal, abnormal seedlings and ungerminated seeds. Therefore, the ISTA Rules will be crucial for developing a deep learning model of the multimodal high-volume data sets. The talk was well received and opened up the questions of whether DNA repair will occur during the accelerated ageing process or if x-ray computed tomography could harm the seeds.
Authors: NPZi