Araponics is a spin-off company from the University of Liège (Belgium). The founders are plant physiologists from the Périlleux's Lab (Formerly Bernier's Lab). Their researches are focused on various plant development responses to environmental cues, such as temperature or photoperiod. Historically, the main expertise and central interest of the lab is the floral induction process. As in many other developemental processes, all plant parts, including the roots, are involved in environmental, plant status perception and signal transduction leading to flowering. With Arabidopsis as a model plant not only to study the genetic pathways underlying the flowering process but also the physiological events occuring at different plant age or in different organs, it became necessary to access, monitor or even manipulate the roots and their environment.
In the early 2000's, the researchers started to try to use soiless, i.e. hydroponic, cultures but were rapidly facing the problem that no commercially available growing devices were designed or even adapted to this tiny plant with its tiny seeds. They thus decided to designed their own system... The success of the open-source paper describing their set-up (Tocquin et al. 2003)[https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2229-3-2] and the many requests from the worlwide colleagues encourages them to make it available to the community: Araponics was borned.
In addition to its own products, Araponics offers its customers products of other brands, such as GHE or Goponic, which were tested by ourself in the context of scientific research, especially with model plants such as Arabidopsis, Brachypodium, tomato or tobacco.
In the process of developping its own products, Araponics has developed an expertise in the design and 3D printing of plastic parts. We make this expertise available to our customers as a service: we receive their 3D model files (STL files), edit them if necessary and print the pieces at a very competitive price. We can also produce the 3D models based on the instructions or sketches of our customers.
Finally, beyond the scientific sector, Araponics intends to develop high-end products for horticulture and urban agriculture. In partnership with GDTech, we are already able to offer customized lighting solutions to our customers. We are also active in the development of original LED lighting to offer new innovative solutions to both our scientific clients and horticulturists.