Fabricated ecosystems—EcoFABs—are plastic, takeout box–sized growth chambers developed at Berkeley Lab to be a standardized and reproducible platform for conducting experiments on model plants and the microbes that live around their roots. A greater understanding of how plants and microbes work together to store vast amounts of atmospheric carbon in the soil will help in the design of better bioenergy crops for the fight against climate change.
The overarching aim of EcoFABs is to enable plant microbiome researchers to share data and build on one another’s work. Currently, around 20 laboratories are using the devices, according to Vlastimil Novak, a project scientist in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, but the hope is to eventually make them more broadly accessible to anyone in the world.
In a study recently published in Science Advances, Novak and colleagues in Trent Northen’s lab used EcoFABs to test how different forms of nitrogen—ammonium, nitrate, or a combination—affect the production of organic substances given off by the roots of a small grass species used as a model for bioenergy grasses. They found that varying levels of nitrogen affected the type of compounds produced by the roots and that the plants grew best when they received both ammonium and nitrate.
The ultimate goal is to integrate EcoFABs with an automated robotic system, the EcoBOT, that can run experiments autonomously. Humans would design experiments on a computer and the robotic system would execute them by itself, explained Pete Andeer, an EGSB research scientist who worked with Northen to design the EcoFAB. This would dramatically increase the speed of discovery in plant microbiome research.
In addition to providing a plethora of benefits for professional scientists, EcoFABs are making an imprint in the classroom. The Northen lab’s outreach activities include collaborations with local educational institutions that give high school and community college students the opportunity to design and conduct their own experiments using the devices.
Read the feature article in the Berkeley Lab News Center.
