Plant scientists hail city GroDome

2009-07-02
Newsfeed

Scientists have been provided with their first custom-built urban facility for developing `green` technologies from plants.

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Scientists have been provided with their first custom-built urban facility for developing `green` technologies from plants.

The £1 million, 200 sq m GroDome on the roof of Imperial College London is already being used to research biofuels and crops that are better able to adapt to changing environment.

The biofuels project extracts sugars from the cell walls of willow trees, and can also be used to create 'green chemistry' for plastics such as polyethylene.

Crop survival is being studied in a programme involving the tomato genome, sequencing genes associated with receptors inside the plant's cells that may lead to stress resistance.

A third group has planted 200 small Medicago truncatula legume plants known as Barrel Medic in a bid to show how aphids, a serious agricultural pest, interact with their plant hosts.

A futuristic 'greenhouse' means that scientists in central London will be able to grow large quantities of plants for these and other groundbreaking experiments.

The temperature and light-controlled growing space is ideal for nurturing a variety of plant species for the periods of time needed to produce reliable results.

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