Forecast at the Biotron: Rosy climates for scientists, industry
 Yoo-Sun Noh, a research associate working with Richard Amasino, professor of biochemistry, searches for a specific mutant characteristic in a sea of plants in the mustard family called Arabidopsis. It’s of interest to scientists in the race to completely sequence the genome of a plant. The project is one of many climate- and environment-related experiments conducted at the university Biotron. Photo: Brian Moore
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As a place where scientists can order their own designer climates, the university’s Biotron serves up frozen tundra, ocean depths, arid desert and mountaintops all on the same floor.
In one room is a perfectly cozy, cool environment for ground squirrels to spend the winter tucked in hibernation. Another room is simulating what three years of brutal sunlight and heat will do to motorcycle parts. A third room simulates the pressure professional divers encounter in the deep seas.
“We can create pretty much any climate on earth and do it in a controlled way,” says Director Thomas Sharkey, standing before a humming wall of wires in the control room. Most of the hardware in here is more than 20 years old – fossils by today’s technology standards – yet still does the job with amazing precision.
The facility has been around since 1965, but only recently has come into its own as a research hub for special-needs projects around campus, and is even attracting occasional projects from industry. Sharkey says the facility rebounded from drought years in the 1980s by adding a sophisticated new greenhouse in 1996, making smarter use of space and taking advantage of a lab shortage campus-wide.
“We’re now adding research projects to every nook and cranny we can find,” says Sharkey. “We’ve more than doubled the space being used while actually lowering our rates.”
The recent industry interest in Biotron has produced some unusual projects. Buell Motorcycles, a subsidiary of Harley Davidson in Milwaukee, has developed a new type of plastic gas tank and needed a place to study how they will hold up to sunlight. They are currently being bathed in intense light and heat, simulating three years of sunlight in 12 weeks.
This summer, Sharkey says, a Minnesota heating and air conditioning company rented two rooms – one kept at below zero and another at summer heat – to measure how their air-intake units held up to extreme temperatures. The air exchange between the rooms actually caused a foot of snow to precipitate in the cold room.
How high and low can the Biotron go? A UW–Madison performance artist demonstrated by taking a room from its coldest to warmest temperature as fast as possible, while videotaping his physical reaction. The range? From about 4 below zero to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, all in about 20 minutes. “The experiment broke his video camera,” Sharkey says. “I never did see the results.”
But the Biotron’s core value is in giving the scientific community on campus one of only a few places in the world to conduct controlled environment research. Sharkey estimates that dozens of Biotron projects over the years, bringing in millions in federal research funding, could not have been accomplished without the facility.
Food scientists, for example, take advantage of the Biotron’s controls to study how the pathogen E. coli, which sickens thousands each year, can stay alive in processed meats and other foods. Yet another study is finding lines of turfgrass most resistant to freezing. Another project involving hibernating ground squirrels, focuses on human health implications for digestive disease.
But the 10,000 square feet of new greenhouse space is the biggest draw. Sharkey says the campus currently has a shortage of available greenhouse space, and the Biotron offers the most sophisticated controls available on light, temperature, humidity and watering. It even has 30-foot-tall greenhouse spaces for growing trees indoors.
Plant pathology Professor John Helgeson is studying a fungal disease called late blight that poses a significant threat to the nation’s potato industry. It is the same disease that caused the devastating Irish potato famines in the mid-1800s, and can wipe out an entire Wisconsin field in three days, Helgeson says.
Helgeson’s work at the Biotron is testing new varieties of potato that show natural resistance to the late blight fungus. It will lead to a way to control the disease for the entire industry. Wisconsin alone uses up to 500 tons of fungicide a year to stop late blight; this project could cut that number in half.
“Farmers like this project because of the bottom line, but the public likes it because we wouldn’t be using so many chemicals,” he says.
Richard Amasino, professor of biochemistry, is leading a project with a plant in the mustard family called Arabidopsis. It’s of interest to scientists in the race to completely sequence the genome of a plant.
Amasino’s team is growing roughly 100,000 of these fast-growing little plants with “knockout genes.” With a gene missing from a mutant line of the plant, they can identify the exact function of that gene. They want knockout plants for all 25,000 genes in Arabidopsis.
“We’re developing a wonderful toolbox to determine all of the functions that genes perform,” he says. The project is a national resource that will provide seeds to research projects around the country.
Hannah Carey, the veterinary medicine associate professor who works with hibernating animals, says her colleagues at other universities are envious of what the Biotron offers. “We can get as close as possible to simulating a burrow underground,” she says. “It works for us. The squirrels like it, too.”
Tags: research