Understanding plants

The aim of NPEC is to facilitate research on the impact of environment on plant phenotype. Many plant phenotypes are monitored in environmental conditions. These large-scale and high precision measurements are used to increase our understanding of the genetic control and response of plants to their environment. We offer multi-scale phenotyping to analyse plant performance under diverse environmental conditions and to characterise the traits contributing to performance in these multi-environment scenarios.

We will allow the study of plants in relation to biotic and abiotic factors, including plant-microbiome interactions, plant-plant competition, plant diseases and exposure to a multitude of variable abiotic environmental conditions, such as light quality, irradiance levels, nutrient supply, temperature, humidity, soil pH and atmospheric CO₂ levels.

The performance of plants (i.e. root and shoot system development and architecture, disease resistance, herbivore attraction, irradiation use efficiency, water and nutrient use efficiency, plant-microbiome establishment, etc.) can be examined using a range of sensors, providing data from the molecular level to the level of field crops and ecosystems.