Award details

Controlled environment transgenic plant growth facility

Reference	BB/C511064/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Simon Turner
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Caroline Bowsher, Dr Clifford Bray, Dr Anil Day, Dr Patrick Gallois, Dr Michael Kertesz
Institution	The University of Manchester
Department	Life Sciences
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	39,240
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/09/2005
End date	31/08/2006
Duration	12 months

Abstract

The ability to rapidly transform Arabidopsis together with new technologies designed to exploit the genome information has led to an unprecedented opportunity to address many of the outstanding questions in plant Biology. In particular the integration of microarray and proteomic data with reverse genetics, metabolomics and bioimaging using fluorescent proteins will clearly offer a very powerful means of addressing questions about gene function, proteins interactions and localisation. The successful use of these methodologies, however, does place additional specification on the growth of plant material. Firstly, plant material grown for microarray, proteomic or metabolomics studies requires a properly controlled and reproducible environment. Clearly, greenhouse grown plants will no longer give suitable reproducibility between experiments. Furthermore, for very sensitive studies only material grown side by side under the same conditions within the same growth chamber is likely to give consistently reproducible results. The second implication of applying these post-genomic technologies to plant biology is the increased use of transgenic plants. While the availability of a large collection of insertional mutants has greatly facilitated the generation and screening of knock-out lines using reverse genetics, all the plants generated are transgenic. Similarly, visualising the localisation and dynamics of fluorescent fusion proteins requires the use of transgenic plants. As a consequence this work has led to a large increase in the requirement to grow transgenic plants. All these transgenic plants have to be grown in a properly contained environment in compliance with government health and safety and environmental legislation. Large walk-in chambers are a very cost-effective alternative that offer suitable flexibility such that it would be possible to grow large numbers of plants side by side or alternatively several different experiments could be carried out simultaneously. To significantly increase our capacity to grow transgenic Arabidopsis under controlled environmental conditions it is proposed to purchase two further Sanyo-Gallenkampf SGR123.CFT.J walk-in plant growth chambers.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Plant & Microbial Sciences (PMS)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	Research Equipment Initiative 2004 (RE4) [2004]
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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