Lincoln University, New Zealand Biotron, Plant Growth Chambers & Controlled Environment Facility
5.4 هزار بار بازدید -
12 سال پیش
-
The biotron facility is a
The biotron facility is a containment facility.
It has been designed specifically for working with bio-control agents. This is an area we are particularly interested in as well as global warming and climate change.
We have six growth rooms at the moment, combined with the downstairs part of the facility where we have our rhizotron containers. This makes us a very functional facility in terms of plant growth, plant research and soil interactions with those plants.
The Conviron growth rooms have very high specifications. We can control the air temperature in the rooms from from minus 10 to 40°C. We have humidity control and dehumidification and very high light intensities up to 1150 µmoles/m/s2.
We also have additive CO2 so we can work from ambient CO2 to conditions right rough to 2000 parts per million. All of these ante rooms have their own individual air supply that comes in through the ceiling. That air goes in to the growth rooms, then gets extracted out through hepa extraction systems. Researchers we have in this facility are able to work with confidence knowing that other work in the facility actually has no effect on their experiments.
Controlling Environments
The facility is either used for one of two purposes. It's either used as growth cabinets or the combination of growth rooms and below ground rhizotrons.
This system delivers many advantages. If you just take a rhizotron and just put it into a growth chamber then you would have soil conditions at the same temperature as the growth chamber. And in reality, soil in the field is not like that. The soil at the surface is the same temperatures the air, sometimes a bit higher. But, soil temperature decreases very rapidly as you go down. And that is what we try to do here. To create an environment where you have a real temperature profile going down into the soil. That temperature is partly controlled by the above ground conditions, but we also control the below ground conditions to get the proper variation of drop in temperature as you descend down into the soil.
You can also create the conditions that are ideal for the disease. For example if it is a fungal disease -- you want humidity and high temperature. You can do that here. Or for example you might want to look at the same plant, the same disease, same soil but different humidity, different temperature.
Technically we could actually set up six different CO2 scenarios in here and run a set of experiments. As far as I know I don't know anywhere else in the world that can do that - again, using real systems and real rhizotrons.
Soil Assessment
We are using pinus radiate as a model plant. And what we are trying to do is look at the influence of root exudate - which is carbon that comes out of the roots on microbial populations below ground. .
The work from that was used to test the system and develop the methodology below ground. That's where we started off with just a simple camera system for looking below ground. However, we could look, but we couldn't sample -- and that was when we came up with the idea of using a laparoscope. It allows us to sample at different times, at different place. It also allows us to visualize things so we could actually take pictures of where we are taking soil samples from. That was a big advance and very successful.
Modeling Nature
An experiment that we just completed last year was using the controlled facilities of Conviron to control for night and day and look at greenhouse gases/nitrous oxide flow from grassland. We were actually trying to measure how it changes with temperature and light. This facility allows us to do that and we did it in real rhizotrons, in real conditions, which gave us the advantage not having to go around in the middle of the night in the field. We were able to control it, we were able to come here during the middle of the day and do the detailed experiments -and that's a real advantage.
Biological Control
These experiments are primarily looking at biological control - which is the focus on a particular disease. What they do is they look for an organism from the soil or from somewhere else that they can actually culture out and then control it. They formulate and concentrate the organism and put it for example on to the seeds. And hopefully that would reduce the incidence of disease in the plants.
In terms of running an experiment it means we can have replicated experiments in each of those growth rooms and be confident that the conditions that those plants are experiencing and the soil environments are all exactly the same. That is very reassuring for us.
It has been designed specifically for working with bio-control agents. This is an area we are particularly interested in as well as global warming and climate change.
We have six growth rooms at the moment, combined with the downstairs part of the facility where we have our rhizotron containers. This makes us a very functional facility in terms of plant growth, plant research and soil interactions with those plants.
The Conviron growth rooms have very high specifications. We can control the air temperature in the rooms from from minus 10 to 40°C. We have humidity control and dehumidification and very high light intensities up to 1150 µmoles/m/s2.
We also have additive CO2 so we can work from ambient CO2 to conditions right rough to 2000 parts per million. All of these ante rooms have their own individual air supply that comes in through the ceiling. That air goes in to the growth rooms, then gets extracted out through hepa extraction systems. Researchers we have in this facility are able to work with confidence knowing that other work in the facility actually has no effect on their experiments.
Controlling Environments
The facility is either used for one of two purposes. It's either used as growth cabinets or the combination of growth rooms and below ground rhizotrons.
This system delivers many advantages. If you just take a rhizotron and just put it into a growth chamber then you would have soil conditions at the same temperature as the growth chamber. And in reality, soil in the field is not like that. The soil at the surface is the same temperatures the air, sometimes a bit higher. But, soil temperature decreases very rapidly as you go down. And that is what we try to do here. To create an environment where you have a real temperature profile going down into the soil. That temperature is partly controlled by the above ground conditions, but we also control the below ground conditions to get the proper variation of drop in temperature as you descend down into the soil.
You can also create the conditions that are ideal for the disease. For example if it is a fungal disease -- you want humidity and high temperature. You can do that here. Or for example you might want to look at the same plant, the same disease, same soil but different humidity, different temperature.
Technically we could actually set up six different CO2 scenarios in here and run a set of experiments. As far as I know I don't know anywhere else in the world that can do that - again, using real systems and real rhizotrons.
Soil Assessment
We are using pinus radiate as a model plant. And what we are trying to do is look at the influence of root exudate - which is carbon that comes out of the roots on microbial populations below ground. .
The work from that was used to test the system and develop the methodology below ground. That's where we started off with just a simple camera system for looking below ground. However, we could look, but we couldn't sample -- and that was when we came up with the idea of using a laparoscope. It allows us to sample at different times, at different place. It also allows us to visualize things so we could actually take pictures of where we are taking soil samples from. That was a big advance and very successful.
Modeling Nature
An experiment that we just completed last year was using the controlled facilities of Conviron to control for night and day and look at greenhouse gases/nitrous oxide flow from grassland. We were actually trying to measure how it changes with temperature and light. This facility allows us to do that and we did it in real rhizotrons, in real conditions, which gave us the advantage not having to go around in the middle of the night in the field. We were able to control it, we were able to come here during the middle of the day and do the detailed experiments -and that's a real advantage.
Biological Control
These experiments are primarily looking at biological control - which is the focus on a particular disease. What they do is they look for an organism from the soil or from somewhere else that they can actually culture out and then control it. They formulate and concentrate the organism and put it for example on to the seeds. And hopefully that would reduce the incidence of disease in the plants.
In terms of running an experiment it means we can have replicated experiments in each of those growth rooms and be confident that the conditions that those plants are experiencing and the soil environments are all exactly the same. That is very reassuring for us.
12 سال پیش
در تاریخ 1391/11/16 منتشر شده
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