Plant Miniature Greenhouse

Abstract We report on the development of a miniature greenhouse for large-scale phenotyping of Arabidopsis thaliana plants. This greenhouse is capable of flexibly creating and varying a set of environmental conditions including temperature and light intensity through electronic circuits. The device uses light emitting diodes as light source, combines a thermoelectric cooler and a heater to fine tune the internal growth temperature, and uses a liquid crystal shutter to allow automatic imaging from outside of the device when needed. We demonstrate utility of the miniature greenhouse in conjunction with a vertical plant chip to continuously monitor both the vegetative and reproductive growth of wild-type and the immutans mutant of Arabidopsis. In addition, the phenotype and growth timeline of plants grown within the miniature greenhouses are highly comparable to previously published reports. Thus, this newly developed device can serve as a powerful platform for large and multi-scale level phenotyping of Arabidopsis plants with sufficient throughput, and under environmental conditions critical for plant growth.