High-Throughput Phenotyping: Status and Applications in Rice Breeding

The reliance on traditional or manual phenotyping creates significant operational bottlenecks in rice breeding due to its resource-intensive and time-consuming nature. This review focused on the significance of high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) as a promising technology that enables rapid, accurate, and non-destructive phenotyping of large populations. HTP has great potential to accelerate rice breeding by revolutionizing phenomics. This review examined the various applications of HTP in rice research, phenomics, and breeding. The use of HTP in rice has been substantiated through a range of cutting-edge technologies, such as drones, imaging systems, and sensor networks, that facilitate precise monitoring of key traits at various growth stages, assessment of responses to biotic and abiotic stresses, and the identification of genes or quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with essential characteristics. Also, this review discussed HTPs’ contributions to current rice breeding programs and documented notable challenges in scaling them. This review offers insights into optimizing HTP strategies to advance rice research, phenomics, and rice breeding.