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A greenhouse for genius

HOME SWEET BIOMES / A new super-lab at the University of Western Ontario will be a hothouse -- or cold one if need be -- for the newest ideas in disease, ecosystems and agriculture from around the globe

Tom Spears
CanWest News Service

Sunday, August 06, 2006

CREDIT: The Associated Press

Want to re-create a steamy tropical rainforest where chameleons thrive? Scientists will be able to do that in one of the advanced labs in the Biotron building.

A new biology super-lab under construction in London, Ont., will make Canada a testing ground for the latest ideas in disease, ecosystems and agriculture from all over the world.

If it works out as planned, scientists from many countries will be jockeying for time in this super-lab in the same way that astronomers used to line up to use the Hubble Space Telescope.

When it opens next year, the five-storey Biotron building at the University of Western Ontario will have advanced labs for studying genetically modified plants, earth sciences, insects, bacteria and, especially, climate change.

But plenty of universities have fancy labs. The Biotron's unique twist is its top floor: a group of six enclosed super-greenhouses, each a sealed and climate-controlled mini-environment where scientists can do field tests that create conditions of the outside world, without ever going outside.

They'll be able to create the frigid darkness of Arctic winter, or the steamy heat of a tropical rainforest. They'll be able to see what happens to a genetically modified crop under realistic conditions, without letting it escape into the environment.

These greenhouse-like testing areas are called biomes, a term usually meaning a type of ecosystem such as a desert or a tundra.

"This is the first time anything like that has ever been built. So we're absolutely unique," says Duncan Hunter, associate dean of science at Western.

"They're sort of greenhouses, but unlike most greenhouses these are enclosed, self-contained. You can change the atmosphere. You can introduce specific animals, plants, microbes, all this sort of stuff. If you like, you can do 'pre-field' testing. You can see what affects plants' growth -- what kinds of organisms matter, what kinds don't."

For the Biotron's $28-million cost (half for the building, half for equipment), Canada will have a growing space, literally, for breaking ideas in biology.

It may even be better than the real world, says Hunter. "In the field you have no control, or very limited control of what comes and goes. (In the Biotron) you can do controlled experiments and do what really matters.

"There is no other facility like this in the world."

It's one thing for Western to love the idea. But outsiders are impressed, too.

Western went to the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a federal funding agency for research, with a simple message -- we need $11.3 million.

CFI approved the cash in 2003 after two assessments -- one by independent experts in the field, and then by a more wide-ranging committee of academics and industry advisers. Both gave the Biotron raves.

"The experts felt there were few, if any, facilities like it anywhere in the world," said CFI president Eliot Phillipson. "The potential benefits for the country -- it has profound scientific and social benefits."

CFI kicked in 40 per cent of the $28 million. The Ontario government matched that, leaving Western and the University of Guelph -- Western's partner in this venture -- to find the remaining $5.6 million through an array of donors -- Agriculture Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, and the universities themselves.

One full floor of the building will be dedicated to each of four branches in biology -- earth sciences, microbiology, plants and insects. But it's not big enough to handle mammals.

This allows anyone with an experiment to do the test-tube-scale work in a lab, and then scale it up to the size of a walk-in chamber. Finally, they can test-drive the results in a biome of about three by six metres, with controls for light, heat, humidity, pollution levels and other factors.

Control over the air itself means they can add an unusual isotope to the air -- a chemical marker that shows the researcher how common chemicals travel through the cells of plants and animals. Following where this isotope goes could show, for example, what chemical compounds a plant manufactures when it's under attack by disease or insect pests. You can't do this on a farm or in a forest -- or even in a conventional lab, where the air supply is not sealed.

The biomes will bristle with monitoring equipment. Scientists from Sweden or Japan can come to London, set up the experiment, and return home to monitor it remotely. They'll even be able to change a lot of the controls (such as temperature) from their home labs.

Another rare factor is the mix of disciplines in one setting. It makes sense to have the insect scientist and the plant scientist in the same building; somehow, more ideas tend to blossom in the human brain when a group of people from differing backgrounds get together.

"You can model ecosystems and modify all the parameters to create scenarios such as an advanced climate change model," says Amar Singh, the manager of business operations for the Biotron. So scientists could peer into the future and see how plants will grow after the world warms up.

And not just plants. In testing from the ground up, these greenhouses will also test what goes on below the surface, in the hidden but busy world of life underground. Down there, plant roots are interacting with swarms of natural soil bacteria, grubs and fungus species that help or hurt the plant's ability to grow.

"As the climate changes, as demands for food change, we need to be prepared to manage our food supply. That's one way of looking at it," says Singh. "The Biotron allows researchers to study sustainable agriculture to ensure that our crops will be able to adapt to changing climate conditions."

Western researcher Miguel Valvano, for instance, is looking at disease: how does nature create germs that adapt to, and exploit, human or plant weaknesses? "He can't go out to an environment and dump a bunch of pathogens and see what will happen. They'll escape and they'll get lost," says Gordon Southam, a Western biology professor.

"But within the Biotron we can look at a southern Ontario agricultural soil, and address issues of disposing of solids from cities, sewage solids, these types of things, and how they go through these soils. We can track it as it goes down towards groundwater." They can watch the pathogens (disease-causing bacteria or viruses) as they adapt in their new surroundings and spread disease.

The University of Guelph's Biotron component is looking more at low-pressure conditions, a preparation toward growing plants in spaceships, or on the moon or Mars, to feed astronauts. (A future project will look at robotic greenhouses, either for high-efficiency farming on Earth, or in space.)

Non-biologists want it, too.

Western's engineering faculty wants a place to design better biofuels, which are alcohol fuels from grain crops or plant waste. The task: get as much fuel and as little waste from each bushel of corn or leftover wheat stalks.

Agriculture Canada has already asked to do research on a virus affecting plum trees. The closest facility now equipped do the work is in France.

Everyone in the project credits one man for thinking big: Norm Huner, now the Biotron's scientific director. He sold it at Western, then at Guelph, winning over skeptics, and helping the Biotron bubble to the top of the university's priorities.

Ask the local researchers what they foresee, and you get an endless stream of sentences that begin: "Another thing we can do is...."

Better efficiency in pesticides, to reduce the amounts used. Breeding in hardiness to cold or hot or dry climates. Resistance to disease.

If the future looks undefined, that's a plus. The Biotron is being built with flexibility in mind; no one wants to blow $28 million on a building that's obsolete in five years.

Says Gordon Southam: "If someone comes in here in five years and says, 'I want a specific kind of tropical environment,' we'll say, 'Sure. How warm and how tropical do you want it?' "

THE BIOTRON'S PRIME TASKS

What research will be the main focus of the new Biotron building at the University of Western Ontario?

- Improve our understanding of the effects of a changing climate on living things.

- Speed up the knowledge of biotechnology. A key here is the use of plants to produce medicinal substances. This includes looking for risks to the environment of breeding these medicinal plants.

- Focus on life underground. Western's Gordon Southam, a biology professor and microbe specialist, for example, can look at what happens when the Arctic permafrost thaws. "We can run through multiple cycles (of freeze and thaw) in one year, looking at the response of natural organisms -- fundamental science -- and linking that to the more applied science of greenhouse gas emissions: How will they change?" he says. "We'll be able to do things you just can't do in nature. You just can't go out in the field and release transgenic organisms."
© CanWest News Service 2006