PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas – What if agricultural researchers could control humidity, light intensity, and temperature variances year-round to increase periods of plant growth? What if it helped them discover optimal environments for growing different kinds of crops? Those scenarios have become a reality at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU).
The Cooperative Agricultural Research Center (CARC) at the university acquired a custom-made plant growth chamber this semester. It allows researchers to finely tune environmental factors that will help them discover genetic and molecular pathways toward optimal plant growth.
“Research on climate change has predicted global warming in the coming decades. We can grow crop plants in the growth chamber under temperatures higher than the current temperature in Texas and gain knowledge on how the crops will respond to global warming,” says CARC Research Scientist Tesfamichael Kebrom, Ph.D.
Kebrom is the chamber’s project leader who helped acquire the machine. He holds appointments at both CARC and the Center for Computational Systems Biology (CCSB) at PVAMU. Funding to purchase the chamber came from the College of Agriculture and Human Sciences (CAHS), the Roy G. Perry College of Engineering’s Chancellor’s Research Institute (CRI), CCSB, and the Faculty Innovation and Enhancement (FIE), an initiative launched in 2018 to support research at PVAMU.
According to Kebrom, it was the coordinated efforts of Seungchan Kim, Ph.D., director of CCSB and chief scientist and executive professor in PVAMU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as CAHS Dean Gerard D’Souza, Ph.D., who brought the machine home to “The Hill.”
“Dean D’Souza has been very supportive of this close collaboration between CRI, CCSB, and CARC. So, the idea of co-sponsoring the purchase of the plant growth chamber came to us naturally,” Kim said. “The equipment can lead to significantly enhance plant science and research capability on campus. Being able to perform plant growth experiments under well-controlled environments is critical to the success and soundness of research, and that’s exactly what the growth chamber provides.”
This is the first plant growth chamber acquisition for the campus, but there are plans for more.
“The acquisition of the growth chamber is part of the long-term strategic plan to equip plant scientists at PVAMU with state-of-the-art research facilities to enhance and add relevance and significance to their research output,” D’Souza said.
A team of scientists from the College of Agriculture and Human Sciences, the College Arts and Sciences, and the College of Engineering will submit grant proposals to funding agencies to acquire more plant growth chambers.
“CAHS plans to renovate the storage area of the former farm-shop at the Cooperative Agricultural Research Center (CARC) to be used to house additional plant growth chambers and establish a state-of-the-art plant growth facility that will serve the plant science community on campus,” D’Souza said.
Kebrom is coordinating requests to use the plant growth chamber. He says the plan is to use it as efficiently as possible to accommodate research faculty and students’ needs. Research can sometimes take years to complete, so additional chambers are needed to run multiple projects simultaneously.
“The first experiment being conducted is on how light and shade signals affect photosynthesis, especially when crops are densely grown and competing for light,” Kebrom said. “The findings will help researchers better understand how molecular mechanisms and genes affect stem growth and a plant’s ability to thrive at high density.”
Kebrom says he hopes it is the first of many projects from the new chamber to be published soon.
“Having a plant growth chamber is an important advancement in the research capability of an institution. It will help to attract collaborations with scientists in other institutions, make new discoveries, succeed in grant proposal applications, publish papers in prestigious scientific journals, and attract graduate students and postdocs who will enrich the research activities on campus,” he said. “Research conducted in growth chambers answer fundamental plant biological questions with broad applications in agriculture and beyond for the wellbeing of society.”
By Jocelyn Kerr
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