Today The John Innes Centre took possession of a brand new £1.3 million, controlled environment
facility. The new facility is extremely important to several of JIC's main research programmes, for
example, work on rice and studies on the sensitivity of plants to day-length.

The new building consists of a controlled environment room (CER) suite containing 3 large (18 m2)
rooms and a barn area. The completely enclosed CERs enable scientists to precisely control the
light quality, day-length, day and night temperatures and relative humidity in the rooms and thus
reproduce the same growing conditions for their experimental plants whatever the outside climate.

Rice is an important food crop in many countries of the world and also a useful experimental plant
for scientists interested in the biology of cereals. Although rice, maize, wheat, rye and other cereal
plants appear to be very different, at the genetic/biological level they are all remarkably alike. Rice
has the advantage for scientists in that it is rather simple in comparison to the other cereals. It has
the disadvantage that, in Norfolk, rice can only be grown in a glasshouse in the summer. The new
CERs will enable JIC scientists to grow high quality rice plants, for experimental use, all year round.

Light is important in controlling plant growth - especially as many plants use a particular day-length
as a trigger to switch on flower production. Because of the tremendous importance of flowering
time in crop plants JIC scientists are very interested in how plants measure and respond to light. In
a CER scientists are able to control the intensity and the duration of the light in their experimental
plant's day.

The 3 rooms, that are being made available for use today, will shortly be joined by another 2 rooms
at a further cost of £250,000.

"Building this facility is a strategic investment in the work of the JIC", said Professor Mike Gale
FRS, Acting Director, "it will add to our ability to study important plant characteristics and enable
us to maintain the world class quality of our science".

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