Even by Dubai's over-chilled indoor standards, the air in the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture is cold. Any warmer would risk damaging its prized specimens.
Behind the white, domed building on the fringes of Dubai Academic City, four vast greenhouses house thousands of plants. A dozen or so researchers patrol the columns of terracotta pots, their footsteps drowned out by the hiss of sprinklers.
Next to them, in three warehouse cold stores, are shelf upon shelf of glass jars, each with its contents recorded on neatly printed labels. Seeds, leaves, soil samples - these are the fruits of the ICBA's efforts to bring faster-growing, less thirsty date palms to the UAE.
To that end, the centre is working on a technology that will inject tiny fungi into the palms' roots. Known as mycorrhizae, they will in effect give the trees a massive network of "hairs" extending from their roots, allowing them to access nutrients and water up to two kilometres away.
That should help the trees produce dates more than two months sooner than they otherwise would; a project that, in March, won the centre a research prize at the Khalifa International Date Palm Awards.
Most plants - some 95 per cent of species - naturally have mycorrhizal roots, in which the plant lives in a close, symbiotic relationship with the fungus, forming a sprawling network of root hairs.
These hairs help the plant absorb water and minerals, as well as fight disease.
In return, the fungus gets food in the form of sugar and other carbohydrates.
The fungi are usually present in fertile soil, teaming up with any plant roots that come their way. But they are almost entirely absent from the UAE's arid, sandy soil.
That makes it hard for palms to grow without constant irrigation.
"It rains less than 100mm annually," says Dr Faisal Taha, the director of technical programmes at the ICBA.
"We cannot afford to give 150 to 180 litres of water per day to each mature tree."
With 41 million date palms in the UAE, they are a major drain on the country's limited water supplies.
What little groundwater there is tends to be extremely saline, says Dr Abdelouahhab Zaid, head of date palm development research at United Arab Emirates University, which cultivates, on average, 150,000 saplings a year.
To cope with that, the palms need help - especially, according to Dr Ghulam Shabbir, a research associate at the ICBA, as they naturally have no root hairs at all. "They depend on it as a secondary system for water intake," he says.
There are two broad ways of adding the fungi the plants need: they can be added to the soil, where they can help any crops grown there, or to the saplings themselves before they are planted out.
Last summer, an Indian company announced plans to try the first approach.
The New Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) said it planned to launch a UAE programme to infuse farmland with mycorrhizae.
But that has now been mothballed. "Our project got delayed because we figured setting up a greenhouse in the UAE was a lot when we already have our labs in India," said Meena Janardhan, the manager of the Teri Gulf Centre in Dubai. She did not rule out a UAE programme in the future, however.
For its part, the ICBA has been experimenting with the second approach, adding fungi to the roots of date palm saplings in its greenhouse in Dubai Academic City - the first time the technique has been used in the Middle East.
Early last year, it started tests with almost 200 saplings of the two main local varieties, khalas and khanezi. They are the best in terms of growth, performance, fruit production and survival in the UAE, says Dr Shabbir, having grown here for centuries.
Khanezi, in particular, is one of the oldest date palm trees in the UAE, and "perfectly domesticated with the country's environmental climate".
The results so far have been encouraging. "It makes the date palm much more capable of survival," said Dr Taha. "The success rate is about 90 per cent because we better equip its roots."
That should mean better dates, produced with less fertiliser and less water. According to Dr Shabbir, it could cut farmers' costs by about two-thirds.
The ICBA is still perfecting its methods in its greenhouse, but hopes to use them on date palm plantations around the country within a couple of years.
Others are pressing forward, meanwhile.
Late last year, the Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority added mycorrhizae to 20,000 mature palm trees along the Abu Dhabi to Al Ain road, digging out the earth around the roots and adding fungus supplied by a US company.
