Clinostat

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Apparatus that slowly rotates a plant or other specimen around one axis so that gravity's effect on its growth is averaged out
2. A rotating laboratory frame that turns organisms continuously so they experience no consistent gravitational pull in any one direction
3. Instrument used in plant biology to keep seedlings turning steadily, cancelling the directional influence of gravity on their orientation

Etymology: A clinostat is a device that slowly rotates a plant on a horizontal axis, so that gravity pulls on the plant from all directions and cancels out its usual sense of "down." Botanists use it to study how plants grow when they cannot tell which way is up, which is a neat way of isolating the effect of gravity on growth. The name is a plain technical coinage built from two Greek elements. "Clino-" comes from the Greek "klinein," meaning "to lean" or "to incline," and it appears in other scientific terms such as "clinometer," an instrument for measuring slope. "-stat" comes from the Greek "statos," meaning "standing" or "stationary," as in "thermostat" or "hydrostat." Put together, the name describes an apparatus that keeps a plant in a constant state of leaning, even as it never stops moving.