By Tucker Wilson
August 24 – Prairie View A&M University’s College of Agriculture and Human Sciences (CAHS) is now home to a custom-made plant growth chamber. By all accounts, it will have a profound effect on research being conducted in the CAHS, Cooperative Agricultural Research Center (CARC).
In the plant growth chamber, humidity, temperature, and light intensity and quality are controlled using a liquid crystal display (LCD) touch screen to create any desired environment. More impressively, the new scientific device used to create environmental conditions for optimum growth of plants will provide invaluable hands-on training for our students. It will help researchers discover plant genes and molecular pathways vital for enhancing crop yields, thus improving plant production and profitability for farmers and helping address global food insecurity.
CAHS Dean and Director of Land Grant Programs, Gerard D’Souza, Ph.D., said, “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 and enhance their research output.” Pamela Obiomon, Ph.D., the Dean of Roy G. Perry College of Engineering, said “Congratulation Team!!! We are excited and looking forward to seeing great research produced due to this addition.”
D’Souza added that the advanced plant science research facility would help attract talented students to the biological and agriculture programs, help scientists and faculty become more competitive with their research grant proposal applications and attract national and international collaborations. Results from the use of the chamber will enable PVAMU scientists and faculty to publish discoveries in high impact journals, which will elevate the national and international visibility of the plant sciences research at PVAMU.
The chamber’s acquisition was a collaborative effort between the College of Agriculture and Human Sciences (CAHS), the Roy G. Perry College of Engineering’s Chancellors Research Initiative (CRI) Center for Computational Systems Biology (CCSB). The funds to purchase the chamber came from CAHS, CCSB, and the Faculty Innovation and Enhancement (FIE) funds. The president’s office created the FIE initiative in 2018 to support research at PVAMU.
CARC Research Scientist Tesfamichael Kebrom, Ph.D., who holds joint appointments at CARC and CCSB, serves as the project leader who helped facilitate the acquisition. Kebrom said: “We can now control the temperature and the amount of light in the plant growth chamber as desired and conduct research throughout the year.”
In addition to Kebrom, others involved in the acquisition of the plant growth chamber include former PVAMU Endowed Professor and Integrated Food Security Center Director (IFSC) Deland Myers, Ph.D., and the Roy G. Perry College of Engineering’s Electrical Engineering Department and CCSB Assistant Professor, Xishuang Dong, Ph.D.
For more information about the new plant growth chamber, contact:
Tesfamichael Kebrom, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
thkebrom@pvamu.edu