Excursion: IPK Gatersleben
09.04.2024, Halle (Saale)
At the beginning, Dr. Jens Freitag, the head of the office, gave us a brief overview of the institute’s fields of activity, which range from phenotyping and gene banks, genome editing and analytics, to bioinformatics and sequencing. The general aim of the institute is to research, preserve and utilize the diversity of crop plants.
We then went to one of the world’s largest gene banks for plants, which contains 151348 accessions from 92 families and 2912 species. Most of this collection is stored at minus 18 degrees celcius so that the germination capacity can be maintained for several decades. The Lemnatech phenotyping facility is used to study plant growth under a wide range of environmental influences. Non-invasively recorded by image, the data obtained is used to establish links between phenotype, genotype and environmental factors. This allows, for example, the effects of genetic variation to be researched. In the phenosphere, we have seen rapeseed plants swaying in the wind indoors and lights that can simulate clouds. Temperatures and light intensities that correspond to winter or midsummer conditions, or rapid changes in conditions as they occur in the field, can be simulated. Research can be carried out here under relevant climate scenarios of the future. Accordingly, a visit to the phenosphere also feels a bit like a trip to the future, or at least to a space station. Some of the plants here grow in boxes that look like windows. Due to the minimal width of these boxes of only 5 cm, the roots are forced to grow mainly along the transparent pane, so that many features of the root architecture can be observed via the image analysis. In a three-part workshop, we gained an insight into the laboratories of molecular genetics and breeding research. We looked at pod embryos under the microscope and prepared DNA for sequencing before having a short discussion with the researchers and then returning to Halle with many impressions.
thanks to: | Dr. Jochen Kumlehn Dr. Jens Freitag and other researchers at IPK |
project: | The Plant Project – Resilience Part II |
year: | 2024 |
text by: | Luci Schwingen & Jonathan Stein |