Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Plant Sciences Research

Article History

Published online: 10 October 2021

The current world needs to use modern technologies in plant science research due to increasing demand on food supply, and to cope up with global climate changes (1). Consequently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technologies are considered as the most recent and advanced research tools in every sector of science. Biological researches are also making progress surprisingly due to the assistance of AI affiliated tools directly or indirectly. Nowadays, plant physiology to genomic manipulation has witnessed, how it is easier and accurate than previous (2). Moreover, continuous monitoring of plants' growth, growing requirements, and growth environment was time and labor-consuming in the past; and the obtained results were somewhat ambiguous to a certain extent. Data processing and analysis were based on individual performances of the participated researchers; surprisingly, the scenarios have been changed after the emergence of AI (3).

Now scientists are developing ideas and set up activities, and then combine these activities with specific AIbased programs to observe the final outcomes as simply as possible (4). Satellite-associated remote sensing in the crop fields and ocean to monitor crops yielding and algal bloom respectively are good examples of the applications of AI. This is more evident in AI-based indoor hydroponic production systems, where the nutrients supply and environment management are done automatically according to the needs of the growing organisms (5). Furthermore, gene identification, DNA sequencing, and genome editing of plants all are assisted by AI in many developed countries. Plant tissue culture also witnesses the assistance of AI in nutrient media management responsible with specific organism (6). Hopefully, in future plant genomics, alternative production systems to evolutionary plant biology research will see a tremendous change in their outputs due to the accurate and relentless analysis by AI or AI derived tools. Thus the risky researches will be solved since direct involvement of human beings will be avoidable. For example, the physical survey for new plants in oceans to steep mountains will be replaced by AI-based machines.

In conclusion, future research on all areas of plant science will embrace the positive aspects of artificial intelligence, which will make the findings more reliable than previous, and will assist the plant scientists to be up-to-date with concurrent outputs.