Image: UFV / Provided / UFV student Emily Foster at work in the cutting-edge Berry Environmental Resilience Research & Innovation (BERRI) Lab on the UFV Chilliwack campus.

By Alyssa Conti

PLANT RESEARCH

UFV research puts heat stress to sleep in strawberry plants

Aug 10, 2025 | 10:20 AM

CHILLIWACK — New research coming out of the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) shows that melatonin can help strawberries relax against warming global temperatures.

Working in the Berry Environmental Resilience Research & Innovation (BERRI) Lab in Chilliwack, UFV student Emily Foster recently concluded a study on how the sleep hormone affects heat stress in alpine strawberries.

“They’re known to be resistant to cold, but not heat,” she explained. “The melatonin decreased the heat stress in both cultivars.”

Foster gave melatonin to a pair of cultivars in 35°C and discovered that it boosted the plant’s survival rate by over 20 to 53 per cent when compared to those without melatonin.

“Pulling the plants out after four weeks of heat stress, I thought I maybe had something and that was exciting, but I still wasn’t sure,” Foster said.

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“[L]ater, I was at home in pajamas running statistics on the computer that confirmed my findings and I jumped up and down and went, ‘Woohoo!’”

She presented her findings at the Canadian Society of Horticultural Science/Canadian Society of Agronomy in June, placing third in a graduate poster presentation competition —the only undergraduate in attendance.