Phenotyping of abiotic responses and hormone treatments in Arabidopsis.

The disruption or modulation of signal transduction pathways does not always lead to drastic changes in plant growth and development. Therefore, many loss- or gain-of-function lines do not exhibit an obvious phenotype under normal greenhouse conditions. To be able to assign biological functions to these genes, the mutants need to be evaluated with a broad spectrum of assays to uncover conditional phenotypes.Here we provide an overview on how to evaluate plants in their development and their response to abiotic factors such as light, hormones, and different stressors. The assessment of the behavior of a plant under these conditions can be used to correlate a biological role with a genotype. This phenotypic analysis can be used for profiling of mutants.