UC Davis, USA, 20 Years of Controlled Environment Research

Описание: University of California, Davis
20 Years of Controlled Environment Research

Presented by Conviron

Bill Lucas | Distinguished Professor
Department of Plant Biology, University of California, Davis

The Controlled Environment Facility or otherwise shortened to CEF here at the University of California, Davis is an important facility that serves a wide range of biologists, experimental scientists, graduate students, undergraduates etc.

We are actually in the twentieth year of our CEF operation and since that time we've built two CEFs. This gives us a combined unit capacity of about 170 controlled environment units that cover all sorts of environmental conditions from regular day length and temperature to elevated CO2 or ozone. We have chambers that can give us down to about -20° and up to whatever temperature you want to cook your plants at. This range is necessary because we have a very large population of faculty that are working on all sorts of aspects of agricultural production; basic biology through to elite lines that are being used out in the field.

One of the most important challenges for the world is food security and the cost of energy. We have faculty using the CEF facility and looking at traits that are important for modern agriculture: water use efficiency, crop yield under less-than-ideal conditions. We have people that are working on better ways to go down the path of biofuels. Crop architecture that's giving you a better opportunity to improve the yield and be more efficient in terms of the fertilizer that's being used. One of the bigger problems in terms of agricultural production is going to be the availability of phosphate as a fertilizer.

When we're looking at phosphate we're looking at the signaling between the roots and the shoots and from the shoots back down to the roots and to be able to dissect out the exact nature of the signals that are being transmitted through the vascular system. To allow the plant to optimize its strategy to find limited nutrient phosphate requires that we grow the plants under very highly controlled conditions. This is very difficult to do in a field, it's just as difficult to do in a greenhouse but it is ideally performed in a growth room because now we can turn on the light at exactly the same time, we can control the intensity, we can reduce the variability associated with our experimental output according to the biological rhythm rather than the perturbation or stress that we're imposing. We originally tried to do these in the greenhouse in my lab and the noise was unacceptable in terms of being able to identify the reproducibility of the signals so we shifted it to large chambers in the CEF and now I'm happy to say we're getting really, really exciting results.

Once we've identified the specific traits in wild plants, wild species that have a much better ability to use phosphate that can go through their life cycle with may one-tenth or one-twentieth the phosphate of a regular agricultural plant. These are the sort of thing we are interested in; how to identify these traits in our research environment here at UC Davis using the controlled environment facility and then going out and working with the agricultural biotech industry to be able to make sure that these traits get introgressed into the different commodity lines that we're interested in.

Without this facility many of the grants, for example that are awarded by the federal agencies couldn't be fulfilled. The CEF is a fundamental facility and is recognized as being one of the best in the United States if not the World.

About Conviron:
Headquartered in Canada and with a global sales, distribution, and service network – Conviron is the world leader in the design, manufacture and installation of controlled environment systems for plant science and agricultural biotechnology research.

Conviron’s reach-in plant growth chambers, walk-in rooms and Argus Control Systems (a Conviron company) provide precise, uniform, and repeatable control of temperature, light, humidity, dehumidification, CO2, and other environmental conditions. All environmental parameters can be remotely programmed, monitored and analyzed with unparalleled accuracy and convenience. With a staff that includes specially trained engineers, technicians and controls experts, Conviron is well equipped to supply both standard and custom applications for our clients.

Conviron's controlled environments can be found in small start-up facilities to many of the world’s largest and most prestigious universities and research facilities in over 90 countries around the world.

Learn more at www.conviron.com or contact us at [email protected]