Harnessing the power of high-throughput phenotyping for chile pepper improvement.
This theme will focus on using secondary traits such as physiological and vegetation indices derived from different HTP platforms for indirect selection of Chile pepper lines with improved quality, yield, and disease resistance. The feasibility of spectral indices such as Normalized Chlorophyll Pigment Index (NCPI), NDVI, and Modified Chlorophyll Absorption in Reflectance Index (MCARI), among others, to identify disease has been recently demonstrated, where NCPI was observed to be the most effective in identifying diseases in the Chile pepper plant (Kshirsagar et al. 2019). In another study, the effective phenotyping of fruit ripening in Chile pepper through non-destructive spectroscopic probes has been shown (Sharma et al. 2019). Altogether, these studies demonstrate the potential of using these secondary indices as criteria to select for important traits in Chile pepper. In the breeding program, different ground-based and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms will be used to collect physiological traits as determinants of fruit yield, quality, and disease resistance. As with the GEBV-assisted breeding, genetic gains for yield from indirect selection using HTP traits will be estimated and compared to the gains achieved from conventional breeding approaches.