The University of Queensland has won $10 million R&D funding over five years for research seeking solutions to world-wide agricultural problems of pestilence, soil salinity, drought and extreme temperatures.
The work will generate exciting new postdoctoral and postgraduate work and scholarship opportunities on the Gatton and St Lucia campuses.
Venture capital company BioScience Australia will provide $5 million to commercialise each of 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 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, disease, mites and weeds. The findings will be commercialised and made available to growers in Australia and worldwide."
Dr Hassan said plant-based pesticides were far kinder to the environment than conventional, synthetic pesticides.
"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 Naidu 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 teaching."
For more information, contact Dr Hassan, telephone 07 5460 1285, fax 07 5460 1283, e.hassan@mailbox.uq.edu.au OR Dr Bodapati, telephone 3365 2289, emailn.bodapati@mailbox.uq.edu.au
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