Automated eyes watch plants grow: Crop scientists hope to replace traditional painstaking monitoring methods - [News]

A decade ago, a group of crop scientists set out to grow the same plants in the same way. They started with the same breeds and adhered to strict growing protocols, but nonetheless harvested a motley crop of plants that varied in leaf size, skin-cell density, and metabolic ability. Small differences in light levels and plant handling had produced outsize changes to the plants' physical traits, or phenome.