Epilogue: The Future Development of Comparative Methodologies

Abstract

In the first place the philosophy of screening experiments and of the ISP demand that treatments and measurements of plants and plant parts should be relatively simple, reproducible and applicable to large numbers of species. For reasons of efficiency and convenience such bulk processing can at times involve many hundreds of samples over perhaps only a few days. Some well developed and informative techniques exist which unfortunately do not lend themselves to fast processing. One example to which reference is made in the Introduction is the technique of high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). Like many other procedures which confer high precision, this technique is not yet sufficiently developed to be available off-the-shelf in an automated form.