Module 3 – Multi-Environment Climate Chambers

NPEC’s Multi-Environment Climate Chambers Module hosts a series of 15 small climate chambers with the highest level of homogeneity in temperature, humidity, and light intensity available.

This module has been designed to study how plants grow under precisely controlled conditions and how they adapt to stress. It allows the simulation of various temperature or light quality and intensity climate conditions. These chambers can provide a continuous temperature between -5°C to above 40°C. A system of controlled LEDs can adjust the light conditions with nine independent channels and a maximum intensity of up to 2000μmol/m2/s.

These 15 top-end climate chambers enable researchers to experimentally change environmental parameters with sufficient independent replication to draw robust conclusions on how these parameters affect the plant phenotype. Nine chambers provide an above-average range in temperature (10-40°C), humidity (35-90% RH) and light intensity (up to 500 μmol/m2/s). In addition, 3 chambers allow continuous plant growth at temperatures as low as -5°C and 3 are outfitted so that they can mimic sunlight in both light intensity (2000 μmol/m2/s) and light quality (9 independently controlled color channels). Plants grown in these chambers can be imaged in Helios for further phenotyping.

These research facilities take the research field of environmental plant biology in the Netherlands to the next level.