State-of-the-art growth chambers to accelerate the achievement of a sustainable agriculture

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We request the financial support from the NSERC-RTI program to acquire two growth chambers, the BioChambers "Bigfoot" Multi-Tier Reach-In Chamber model SPC-74 and the Conviron GEN1000 Chamber including tissue culture kit Chamber. These state-of-the-art growth chambers will replace our discontinued growth chambers, enriching our plant phenotyping infrastructures and essential for our Plant Research and Innovation Center and Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences. Drs. Pérez López, Menchari, Fournier, and Bélanger lead major research programs funded from various sources, including NSERC, in a very diverse fields of research related to food security, sustainable agriculture, plant health, entomology, and weeds science, areas that have in common the study of plants and their relationship with abiotic and biotic stresses. These chambers will replace two of our Conviron chambers that are now stopped for close to a year due to the lack of parts or the high cost of replacing some of them but served their purpose for more than 20 years. This replacement will allow us to continue with those experiments requiring strictly controlled growth conditions, selection of transgenic lines, and the transformation of complex plant crops that require the generation of callus and subsequent regeneration of full plants, only possible in growth chambers. Currently, we have no alternative option to perform that kind of experiments, because unlike other equipment, there are not growth chamber rental service available in our city that we could outsource. Have access to these growth chambers will guarantee the success of our trainees and the hundreds of students to come in the next 20 years that we expect these chambers to stay active. It will also contribute to keep growing CRIV international recognition and to increase the impact of our findings, what will not only impact positively the Canadian agriculture, but also food security at a global scale in agreement with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.