Photograph: courtesy Kevin Phillips

Research team:

Dr Errol Hassan (Director, BioScience Australia), Dr Farid A.Talukder (Senior Research Officer, BioScience), Associate Professor Alan Wearing (School of Agriculture and Horticulture), Dr Doug George (School of Agriculture and Horticulture), Dr Neil Heather (School of Agriculture and Horticulture), Dr Donald Irving (School of Agriculture and Horticulture), Dr John Dingle (School of Animal Studies), Dr Rafat Alijassim (School of Animal Studies), Associate Professor Shu Fukai (School of Land and Food Sciences) and Dr Naidu Bodapati (School of Land and Food Sciences)

Funding:

2000?2001 ($690,000) 2001?2002 ($1.26 million) 2002?2003 ($1.22 million) 2003?2004 ($1.14 million) 2004?2005 ($860,000)

Email/Web link:

e.hassan@mailbox.uq.edu.au f.a.talukder@mailbox.uq.edu.au

Faculty of Natural Resources, Agriculture & Veterinary Science

A $10 million R&D contract is seeking solutions to worldwide agricultural problems of pestilence, soil salinity, drought and extreme temperatures.

A new contract will generate exciting new postdoctoral and postgraduate work and scholarship opportunities at UQ Gatton and the St Lucia campus.

Venture capital company BioScience Australia will provide $5 million to commercialise two projects. One is seeking biorational (botanical) pesticides, the other is looking at ways to combat stresses imposed by climate and soil.

Both aim to improve crop-yield using natural products and land-based protective mechanisms. Potential benefits include less environmental degradation and more food supplies for the world's steadily increasing population.

Dr Errol Hassan of the School of Agriculture and Horticulture at UQ Gatton, whose research experience includes 30 years work in applied entomology and integrated pest management (IPM), will lead the botanical pesticide project.

"Australian agriculture loses more than 15 percent of crops to insect pests each year, and this new approach will minimise these losses," he said.

"The BioScience funding will help develop preliminary findings on purified plant extracts likely to combat crop damage due to insects, diseases, mites and weeds. The findings will be commercialised and made available to growers in Australia and worldwide."


"Plant extracts are composed of many, many more molecules than are the synthetic products, and our tests suggest that targeted mites and insects don't develop resistance ? even up to 40?60 generations down the track," he said.

"Plant-based pesticide breaks down quickly, easily and safely after it's done its job, with no adverse underground effects such as harmful residues and water contamination, and it affects only target pests. It doesn't have adverse effects on beneficial organisms, and it doesn't eliminate non-target species to create a vacuum in Nature for others to fill."

The St Lucia project is investigating environmental stresses such as temperature extremes, drought and salinity and Australia's diverse conditions make it the perfect laboratory, according to Dr Naidu Bodapati and Associate Professor Shu Fukai of the University's School of Land and Food Sciences.

They say drought is a permanent factor in Australia, and 30 percent of the continent has salinity problems because deforestation has raised the water-table. Low and high temperature extremes can also wreak havoc. For example, Australia lost 25 percent of its rice crop in 1996 and about 40 percent of its wheat in 1998.

"The project involves a new area of science-crop-stress physiology combined with molecular genetics," Dr Bodapati said.

"We're working on ways to protect existing crop varieties using plant-based compounds, and we're using molecular genetics to develop hardier crop varieties. One aspect involves enhancing drought and salt-resistance by coating seeds with organic compounds.

"This is leading-edge research and has great spin-offs for undergraduate and postgraduate training."

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