Danforth Plant Science Center Expansion To Open in April
Date Posted: February 17, 2016
Posted In: Projects,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: An additional 100 plant scientists will have a new home when the expansion wing of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center opens April 15.
The new wing gives the Creve Coeur biotechnology facility space to grow beyond the 230 employees, 160 of whom are scientists, who work there now.
“We’ve been pretty tight for a couple of years,” said Jim Carrington, president of the Danforth Plant Science Center.
The wing is named in honor of Dr. William H. Danforth, the Danforth center’s founding chairman and a former chancellor of Washington University. The center is named after his father.
The new Danforth expansion will open just as planning begins to further develop a biotechnology research district focusing on plant sciences in Creve Coeur.
The St. Louis Economic Development Partnership announced last month that the firm behind planning services for the Cortex technology district in the Central West End was working on the start of a master plan for Creve Coeur near Olive and Lindbergh boulevards.
Anchored by the Danforth center, the 575-acre district would also include the adjacent Bio-Research & Development Growth (BRDG) Park, the Helix Center Biotech Incubator for startup companies, and Monsanto’s corporate campus.
The new 79,000-square-foot Danforth center wing project was announced in 2013, a little more than a decade after the center first opened.
Scientists’ approach to their work and the equipment that allows it has changed a lot since then, Carrington said. He pointed to the Bellwether Foundation Phenotyping Facility, a greenhouse that can store more than 1,000 small plants and automatically water them while recording their growth for experiments. The Danforth center had to build a new structure to house the facility.