Why Use a Plant Growth Chamber?

Plant growth chambers provide specific environmental conditions—including light, temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels—that can be manipulated for a wide range of scientific and commercial applications.

Academic researchers on the cutting edge and innovative ag-biotech companies utilize plant growth chambers to advance the discovery process. This is largely due to their utility at helping address critical challenges of our time and finding solutions to solve such problems as global food security and sustainable agriculture given a rapidly increasing population and a changing environment.

Sophisticated commercial growers and high-performing indoor farms, food companies, and others looking to produce food that is fresher, more flavorful, and healthier also rely on plant growth chambers as specialized growing spaces. By utilizing the near perfect growing conditions that plant growth chambers can provide, these pioneering agrifood players use them to optimize growing regimes and recipes, run trials of new light spectrum, small or large scale germination, and management of plant genetics.

In this article, we’ll cover the most important advantages of plant growth chambers as well as some of the diverse applications that make them so valuable in both academic and commercial sectors.

Quick Takeaways:

• Plant growth chambers allow for the precise control of environmental conditions, making them indispensable for plant science research and the discovery process.
• Compared to other research methods like greenhouses, growth chambers offer superior precision, repeatability, and efficiency, addressing limitations such as environmental variability and space inefficiency.
• They enable experiments that are otherwise not possible in highly variable natural settings, providing insights into plant growth, genetics, and disease resistance under specific environmental conditions.
• Beyond research institutions and university plant science departments, growth chambers are crucial in the field of ag-biotechnology for developing new genetics, crop treatments, and the plant breeding process.
• Plant growth chambers can help accelerate R&D efforts, create high performance product pipelines and enhance the commercial success of agrifoods by facilitating a high degree of reliability, repeatability and rigor - thereby bringing agricultural innovations to market faster.

Why Use a Plant Growth Chamber? 5 Key Advantages

Plant growth chambers have transformed modern approaches to plant science research and agricultural production. They have provided users with the tools and capabilities necessary to conduct experiments with a level of precision and control of the growing environment that would otherwise be unattainable.

Key advantages of using plant growth chambers include:

Accuracy & Uniformity

Plant growth chambers provide consistent environmental conditions across all experiments. Their level of accuracy and uniformity ensure that variables like temperature, humidity, light intensity, and CO2 levels are precisely maintained, allowing for accurate comparisons across studies and experiments. This control is essential for understanding the effect of one or more controllable environmental parameters on growth or development.

Repeatability

The controlled conditions plant growth chambers provide ensures that experiments can be repeated with the same conditions, yielding reliable and reproducible results. This repeatability is crucial for scientific research, where validating findings through repeated experimentation is a foundational principle. It repeatedly allows researchers to confidently attribute observed effects to researcher-determined variables being studied, rather than to fluctuations in the environment.

Accelerated Research

Growth chambers accelerate research by allowing scientists to simulate a wide range of environmental conditions quickly and efficiently. This can significantly reduce the time required to observe plant responses to various stimuli, speeding up the research cycle and enabling faster advancements in plant science and commercial applications.

Multiple Applications

From plant science research conducted at universities to germination testing at laboratories, new seed treatments, or crop genetics - growth chambers support a wide range of applications.

Many Sizes

Plant growth chambers come in various sizes, from small refrigerator-sized units to large walk-in rooms, offering solutions tailored to different research needs and space constraints. This range of sizes ensures that there is a growth chamber suitable for virtually every type of experiment, whether it involves incubation of small plantlets, growth of tall plants to maturity, controlled conditions for a small number of specimens or for a high volume of plants.

Diverse Applications

Plant growth chambers are valuable for a diverse set of use cases across disciplines, underscoring their criticality in foundational research and the practical application of findings.

Plant Science Research

For plant science research applications, Principal Investigators, professors, and students alike at universities or research institutes will use plant growth chambers to advance the discovery process. Sharing their findings with others in the scientific community may involve publication in peer reviewed journals and documenting their growing conditions and type of chamber used. Normally the chamber citation appears in the “Materials and Methods” section of the journal article itself – highlighting the significance of plant growth chambers in the research process. Applications are highly varied and below are just a few samples:

• Simulating different climates to understand how plants adapt to changes in temperature, light, and moisture
• Studying plant physiology, growth patterns, and responses to environmental stresses
• Exploring plant-microbe interactions, plant nutrition, and disease resistance mechanisms in crops
• Investigating plant metabolic processes and how they are influenced by environmental conditions
• Running studies on insect-plant interactions, pest behavior, and the efficacy of pest control measures

Commercial Applications

Innovative ag-biotech companies and sophisticated commercial growers also utilize plant growth chambers to advance their R&D pipeline and bring new solutions to market. Some applications may include:

• New Genetics: Growth chambers are instrumental in the development of selective breeding of crops with desirable traits such as increased yield, disease resistance, and stress tolerance. Breeding programs using plant growth chambers or rooms allow for the rapid generation of plants under specific conditions to select for beneficial traits, accelerating the development process and introduction of improved crop varieties to the market.
• Crop Treatments: Facilitating the testing of new seed or crop treatments, including fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, under controlled conditions to assess efficacy and safety before field trials and commercial use.
• Better Foods: Food companies and advanced growers look to produce food that is fresher, more flavorful, and healthier. By relying on plant growth chambers as a “specialty space” that provides near perfect growing conditions, they can achieve optimized growing regimes and recipes, run trials of new light spectrum, small or high throughput germination, management of plant genetics, and more.

Plant Growth Chambers vs. Greenhouses

Greenhouses, though valuable for large-scale plant cultivation, can present challenges with containment, environmental variability, and space efficiency. They cannot generally deliver the type of uniform conditions required for precise scientific research due to their dependence on external weather conditions and the challenges of tightly controlling large spaces.

In contrast, plant growth chambers offer a highly controlled, contained environment, enabling researchers to simulate and maintain specific environmental parameters, thus ensuring the reliability and repeatability of experimental results. Although not as large as a greenhouse, controlled environments are still scalable and offer a high degree of customizability for various research needs.

Flexibility & Customization

Unlike other methods, growth chambers offer unparalleled flexibility and customization. This versatility is a key advantage, allowing users to tailor the chamber's settings to mimic a vast range of environmental conditions, from cool, dry conditions ideal for studying alpine flora to using the same growing space for higher temperature and humidity applications.

Moreover, growth chambers can be customized to support various stages of plant development and types of experiments. For studies focused on photosynthesis for example, chambers can be equipped with specialized lighting systems that precisely control not just light intensity but the light spectrum. For entomology research, chambers can include insect-proof inserts or phenolic coated refrigeration coils to prevent the corrosive effects of acids associated with the rearing of insects.

For commercial ag-biotech companies, this flexibility enables them to use growth chambers not just for small-scale, early-stage genetic modification trials but also for scaling up to more extensive breeding programs and trials once certain traits are ready for further development.

In Conclusion

Plant growth chambers are important for supporting the world's urgent need for innovative agrifood solutions to address food security, agriculture and other climate-related challenges. They are also vital in pioneering plant science research and propelling agricultural progress, facilitating advancements in a wide number of plant science fields, R&D and commercial applications.

Their versatility and customizability to a wide range of use scenarios and applications fills a gap that would otherwise be present if we were to rely on greenhouses or field applications alone – making them an indispensable tool at universities, research institutes, agbiotech companies and agrifood companies around the world.