Statement of Work - Tissue Culture Chamber.docx

Statement of Work

Project: Growth/regeneration of legumes [Glycine max (soybean), Medicago sativa (alfalfa), Medicago truncatula, Phaseolus vulgaris (common bean)] in tissue culture following transformation

General Information

1.0 Scope of Work: The St. Paul, Minnesota location of the USDA-ARS-MWA is requesting a customized plant tissue culture chamber with an ultrasonic humidifier, advanced lighting to reduce Petri dish lid condensation, and a stacked two-in-one construction to accommodate additional experiments while reducing the overall space footprint.

2.0 Background: The Plant Science Research Unit in the St. Paul, Minnesota ARS location performs research to improve transformation efficiency of legumes, particularly soybean, and to study legume root architecture. Advancement of these research priorities is expected to permit understanding and development of more robust, hardier legumes suited for agricultural purposes in a changing climate. In order to conduct these studies, delicate tissues of legumes must often be grown or regenerated via tissue culture in incubators with fine-tuned controls which provide optimal growth conditions for these delicate tissues. A new tissue culture chamber with additional controls will improve our ability to successfully execute these studies.

Contractor Requirements

3.0 Technical Requirements: Required specification for a new plant tissue culture growth chamber:

Humidity control: Tissue culture chamber is required to have built-in or optional add-on ultrasonic humidifier to modulate humidity within the growth chamber. Humidity control is essential to ensure water in tissue culture media does not readily evaporate, and high humidity generally produces better results for plant material in tissue culture.

Plate lid condensation control via lighting: LED lighting in a tissue culture chamber can cause condensation to form on the lids of Petri dishes used for tissue culture. Lid condensation reduces visibility of the contents in the plate, making it difficult to observe the progress of the experiment and to image the plates for data collection. Condensation can be mitigated by using LED lighting equipped with infrared diodes, variable-intensity LED lighting, or fluorescent lighting. LED lighting is preferrable to fluorescent because intensity of the latter generally cannot be adjusted.

Stacked two-in-one design: A full-size growth chamber with only one door permits only one setting for the entire chamber. This may be disadvantageous if two or more different experiments are intended to occupy a given growth chamber. For this reason, a tissue culture chamber that has two doors (i.e., two chambers with two different settings) offers better accommodations for several different, concurrent experiments. A stacked two-in-one design is additionally beneficial for having the same footprint as a single-chamber incubator, compared with having two separate full-size growth chambers.

4.0 Government Furnished: Not applicable.

5.0 Deliverables/Schedule: Equipment should be delivered to the following:

USDA-ARS-PSRU

1991 Upper Buford Circle 529 Borlaug Hall Falcon Heights, MN 55108 Delivery: 130 days after receipt of award.

6.0 Travel: Vendor will deliver to building loading dock.

7.0 Contractor’s Key Personnel: Not applicable.

8.0 Security Requirements: Not applicable.

9.0 Data Rights: Not applicable.

10.0 Section 508 – Electronic and Information Technology Standards: Not applicable.