Making history at The Plant Accelerator®
The APPN Adelaide Node, The Plant Accelerator® (TPA), passed two significant milestones during 2025 with imaging of the 100,000th plant in their high-throughput conveyor-based imaging system (Smarthouse), and 15 years of national and global leadership in high throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP).
Blog post and photos from the APPN website, April 2026
TPA® was established to provide researchers with advanced plant phenotyping tools to accelerate the understanding, development and validation of resilient, productive and high-quality crops. It opened on 27 January 2010 through funding from the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), host Adelaide University, and the State Government of South Australia.
The purpose-built facility is still the most comprehensive plant phenotyping infrastructure in the country, having introduced an array of new phenotyping technologies to Australian plant science over the past 15 years.
100,000 Smarthouse plants
The 4,000m2 site includes the largest open-access Smarthouses in the world and has been used to study critical traits in plants over the years.
TPA® has contributed widely to research to increase our understanding of salinity stress response in rice[1], barley[2], wheat[3], chickpea[4], grapevine[5] and tomato[6]. This area of study is critical to crop production and global food security as declining soil and water quality degrade agricultural land, adding extra pressure on a food system that needs to cater for a growing population in the face of climate change.
Other research projects making use of the Smarthouses also focused on critical challenges of sustainable food production, including water use efficiency[7], nutrient use efficiency[8], disease detection through spectral signatures[9] and unlocking the power of mycorrhizae to boost yield[10].
A recent project has focussed on manipulating the soil biome of plantation pine trees, to improve climate resilience. This project confirms findings from other plant species that have shown the important role that the soil microbiome plays in crop resilience.
The 100,000th pot contained wheat grown in soil from Caroona, NSW as part of a GRDC-funded project to test different soil amendments and their impact on wheat growth in hostile soils. Once again, this versatile facility was literally breaking new ground in agricultural research for Australia!
If all 100,000 pots studied so far could be placed on the conveyor system together, the line of plants would stretch for over 20 kilometres.
Infrastructure to accelerate vital crop improvements
While the Smarthouses were part of TPA® from the beginning, the facility has continued to integrate novel phenotyping approaches, such as a high-throughput X-ray computed tomography (X-ray CT)) scanner custom-designed for plant research.
Installed in 2021 with funding from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and other partners, the X-ray CT scanner gives Australian researchers the ability to scan samples such as cereal spikes and get detailed information about their internal structure.
In one project using this resource, Adelaide University researchers studied the causes of barley head loss – a devastating tendency for barley crops to shed their grain before it can be harvested.
In addition to imaging systems and scanners, TPA® also offers access to greenhouses and controlled environment rooms, some of which are fitted with automated gravimetric watering systems. This type of facility enables researchers to study heat and drought stress individually or in combination, which is near impossible in field trials.
Expanding Australia’s plant phenotyping capabilities
While controlled environment trials play an important role in plant research, field trials are critical for translating findings from the greenhouse to the paddock. TPA® has expanded its operations to support Adelaide University’s GM field site at Rosedale and provide researchers with mobile phenotyping equipment for ground-based and aerial imaging of crop trials.
The high-tech equipment is only one part of the plant phenotyping equation. Expertise in a diverse range of disciplines is critical to supply researchers with meaningful data.
People-centred progress and innovation
TPA® currently employs more than twenty phenotyping experts including plant scientists, biometricians, data engineers, image and data researchers and specialist technicians.
The team regularly hosts recipients of the APPN Student Internship Awards, which provide post-graduate researchers with $10,000 of access to advanced phenotyping infrastructure and the opportunity to gain valuable hands-on experience by working alongside our expert staff.
“The staff at The Plant Accelerator® have been responsible for an entirely new approach to plant science research in Australia, with many major discoveries delivered over the past 15 years,” said APPN CEO Richard Dickmann.
“Through their dedication and innovation over that time, TPA® has contributed substantially to APPN’s 314 published papers – some 70% of which have appeared in the top 10% of global journals.
“TPA® remains a global leader of high throughput plant phenotyping infrastructure and capability, and its value to Australian crop research continues to be confirmed by strong utilisation, support and funding from peak industry agencies such as GRDC.
[1] Campbell et al., 2015&2017; A-Tamimi et al., 2016; Yichie et al., 2018
[2] Schilling et al., 2014; Meng et al., 2017; Ward et al., 2019; Saade et al., 2020
[3] Asif et al., 2018; Borjigin et al., 2020&2021; Lethin et al., 2022
[4] Atieno et al., 2017
[5] Dunlevy et al., 2022
[6] Morton et al., 2024
[7] (Gill et al., 2022; Midzi et al., 2023; Rosati, Blomstedt, Møller, Garnett, & Gleadow, 2019
[8] Cousins et al., 2020, 2021; Neilson et al., 2015.
[9] Xie et al., 2024; Xie, Plett, & Liu, 2021
[10] Bicharanloo et al., 2023; Watts-Williams et al., 2022.