Woman planting seeds in lab - stock photoCredit: Sergey Mironov/ Moment/Getty Images
Two plant phenotyping facilities will be built in South Africa, to evaluate plant growth characteristics under different climatic conditions in all seasons.
Stellenbosch University (SU) and the University of Pretoria (UP) will host the facilities, using investment of R50 million from South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation. SU has a long history of wheat and grapevine breeding and improvement while UP may focus on other crops, including maize, potatoes, sugarcane and tree species.
John Becker, the director of the African Centre for Gene Technologies at UP says the two indoor, controlled environment platforms will be able to control light, temperature, irrigation and, potentially, atmospheric gas composition. Sensors will detect the responses of plants to the simulated stimuli.
Marike Visser, from the SU School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, says large amounts of data will be collected from various sensors, mostly for plant characterisation, but also to monitor the environment within the facilities. These facilities, once completed, will integrate into the national infrastructure, bridging the gap between small and medium-sized growth rooms, to the existing outdoor in-field plant phenotyping facility at the Agricultural Research Council.
Willem Botes, chair of the Department of Genetics, at SU, says this work helps enable scientists to be more responsive to potential future climate changes.
“Controlling the environment enables us to either simulate some aspects we would like to study and/or minimize the environmental influences on our observations. It also makes it possible for us to conduct experiments all year,” says Botes.
