A Jurassic park that could help us cope with future shocks? At UCD, plants are travelling through time to give us clues on how to adapt, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
IMAGINE HOW differently we might act today if we could travel back through millions of years and watch as vast numbers of species were wiped off the face of Earth. Or if we could fast-forward through the decades and witness the mounting impact of climate change.
This idea may be a flight of fancy, but a facility at University College Dublin is doing what might be considered the next best thing in scientific terms. It is re-creating aspects of Earth’s climate millions of years ago or simulating what it might be like in decades to come, and looking at what happens to living plants in the changed conditions.
The UCD Rosemount Environmental Research Station, which has been up and running for nearly two years, was officially launched this week by Minister for Agriculture, Marine and Food Simon Coveney. Tucked away on the Belfield campus, the €5 million facility is an oasis where The Good Lifemeets high-tech. An automatic weather station, towering over ranks of apple trees, beams results back to a waiting computer; huge glasshouses teem with greenery; and windows on giant growth chambers offer views of experiments in which the chosen plants do their thing in tightly controlled environments.
Dr Jennifer McElwain, a paleobotanist and lecturer at UCD’s school of biology and environmental science, works with the chambered plants, looking at how they respond to carefully designed tweaks in the climate.
“I am interested in how the atmosphere and the climate of Earth have evolved,” she says. “I’m interested in how atmospheric composition and climate have influenced plant evolution, and in turn how large-scale changes in plant evolution have influenced our climate and atmospheric system.”
There’s plenty of drama to look back on. Five mass extinctions, points in geological time when swathes of species were wiped out, show up in the fossil record. And it looks as if it’s happening again.
“Most of the leading conservation biologists are arguing that we are undergoing the sixth [mass extinction] now, due to human factors,” says McElwain.
So how can the climate-controlled chambers help? Measuring the responses of living plants to controlled changes in experimental environments can help us make more sense of the fossil record from previous mass extinctions, and possibly identify ways in which we could help mitigate the effects of climate change now.
“We are generally interested in using our understanding of natural global-warming events in the geological past to try and make better predictions for what is going to happen in the future,” says McElwain, who directs the programme for experimental atmospheres and climate (Péac) facility where the eight walk-in growth chambers stand. Péac, which means “to sprout” in Irish, is funded by UCD and the EU.
McElwain set up the lab while examining the fossil record of a mass extinction at the boundary of the Triassic and Jurassic periods. “We had studied the fossils and rocks and chemistry, and we had reached our limit of understanding using the fossils alone,” she says. “So the next step was to try and use the information we had on what the environmental changes were, and start working with living plants. simulate the environmental conditions which we thought had caused the event, and look at how living plants respond to different combinations of those environmental changes.”
People tend to take plants for granted, she believes, but their sheer biomass on Earth, as well as their importance in the food chain, make them good experimental subjects for her team’s research. Plus, they can’t run away. “I am fascinated by the idea that an individual plant is not mobile, so it has to be tolerant of a very broad range of environmental conditions to survive,” she says.
McElwain has taken care in choosing the plants that grow under scrutiny in the chambers. They include more modern species, such as passion flowers, as well as hardy old-timers, such as conifers, cycads and the “living fossil”, Ginkgo biloba.
“We have been working with plants that are good analogues for those that existed in the the age of dinosaurs,” she says.
The growth chambers are programmed for day and night length, light intensity and temperature. “We can simulate a cloudy day in Ireland or a high-light day in the tropics,” says McElwain.
Crucially, the plants are also exposed to controlled atmospheric levels of three gases: carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and oxygen. That’s an important feature, McElwain believes, because looking at the effects of changing just one gas might tell you little about the overall effects of changing more than one.
McElwain, who has recently secured a prestigious European Research Council grant to fund her team’s work on the effects of atmospheric oxygen, argues that understanding more about how plants alter their physiology, structures and shapes, and how they conserve water in changing atmospheres, can help us plan for changed climates in the future.
Looking ahead: How food and fuel could come from one plant
Food security is a major focus of research at the UCD Rosemount Environmental Research Station. “Ireland and the world face major challenges that will impact upon our ability to produce crops,” says Dr Fiona Doohan, a lecturer in plant pathology at UCD. “These include increasing population, climate change and the competition between food and fuel crops for land area.”
Some plants are more adaptable than others, and Doohan’s research is looking at ways to improve cereal resistance to disease and harsh environments. Her work is funded by Science Foundation Ireland and has links to other universities and to Teagasc.
She is also seeking out genes from fungi that could allow easier conversion of hard-to-degrade compounds, such as straw, into more valuable products, such as bioethanol.
“It brings us a step closer to producing multifunctional plants,” Doohan says, “meaning we can get food and fuel from the same plant.”
