Plant growth facility

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This proposal solicits funding to purchase several plant growth chambers, and to relocate existing chambers to create a plant growth facility housed in a new Science Research building that is now under construction. The chambers provide a highly controlled and stable environment in which to grow plants for five different research groups comprising approximately 40 active researchers. Each research unit has an independent focus with various aspects of plant development, seed dormancy and germination, sexual reproduction and genetic recombination, energy metabolism and metabolic stress, and ion transport and nutrient acquisition being actively investigated by five NSERC-funded faculty members and their research groups. Despite these broad research topics that utilize different plant species, approaches, and instrumentation, we have in common the need for highly regulated growth facilities to support optimal growth for our research materials. The chambers can readily be used to test the influence of a variety of environmental factors such as light, humidity, day length and temperature, on a variety of plant processes, from the whole plant to the molecular level. Moreover, with the reality of global climate change, some chambers will be equipped with the ability to control CO2 levels, making them very valuable for future studies of carbon utilization, photosynthesis and biofuel research.