This article was taken from the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
The National Plant Phenomics Centre (NPPC) at Aberystwyth University will help us avoid a food bottleneck. The UN predicts that by 2050 the world's population will have reached 9.6 billion. "At the same time, the amount of farm land is decreasing," explains the NPPC's director, phenomics professor John Doonan. "We're developing new methods for identifying the genes' underlying trait characteristics, to increase food production and yield."
Achieving that means learning from a surprising role model --
Amazon. "If you can imagine the job it has done for shopping, that's what we're aiming at," explains Doonan. "To integrate systems biology on one side, and automation and plant handling on the other." Across the 750m2 greenhouse, 880 carriages - each containing up to ten plants - are carried between watering stations on moving belts. Although the two main sections are climate-controlled for light and heat, the plants randomly shuffle in position to even out microclimate fluctuations. Most importantly, the plants are scanned in five imaging cabins each day, to build up a sophisticated model of each specimen.
Next door is the university's Translational Genomics Lab, where breeds of crops such as wheat, barley, oats, rapeseed and maize can have their genome sequenced. The system can scan every plant in the greenhouse every 14 hours, with each plant taking roughly a minute per cabin. Each carriage can weigh as much as 10kg, but, Doonan says, it only takes a team of six to operate the whole system. "It allows us to do work that would be too labour intensive."
Trial populations are being calibrated ahead of full operation in 2014. "It's an exercise in systems integration, something that biologists have tended not to be so high-level at," says Doonan.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
