Chlorophyll fluorescence emission can screen cold tolerance of cold acclimated Arabidopsis thaliana accessions

Background An easy and non-invasive method for measuring plant cold tolerance is highly valuable to instigate research targeting breeding of cold tolerant crops. Traditional methods are labor intensive, time-consuming and thereby of limited value for large scale screening. Here, we have tested the capacity of chlorophyll a fluorescence (ChlF) imaging based methods for the first time on intact whole plants and employed advanced statistical classifiers and feature selection rules for finding combinations of images able to discriminate cold tolerant and cold sensitive plants.