What is it about?
Many scientific experiments with plants are carried out under controlled conditions in growth rooms or glasshouses. This allows for a better repeatability of experiments, but how do the results relate to plants that grow in the field?
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Why is it important?
If experiments in the lab are done with plants that differ strongly from those in the field in physiology and morphology, it may not be so self-evident to forecast what happens in the field from plants that were grown under very different conditions in the lab.
Perspectives
Plants in the lab are generally grown under relatively low light and high temperatures. They grow faster, but are harvested at a very young age. It might be worthwhile to think whether they could not be better grown under higher light and lower temperatures, where their source:sink ration is very different.
Hendrik Poorter
Forschungszentrum Jülich
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Pampered inside, pestered outside? Differences and similarities between plants growing in controlled conditions and in the field, New Phytologist, October 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/nph.14243.
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