Australia's rich agribiotech harvest

Australia came second by a nose in the race to clone the world's first plant gene, but its prize was the first gene for a plant enzyme: the maize alcohol dehydrogenase gene, complete with the transposable DNA element that had silenced it.

CSIRO Plant Industry geneticists Dr Jim Peacock and Dr Liz Dennis presented the sequence for the Ds (Dissociator) element to pioneering maize geneticist Dr Barbara McClintock for Christmas, 1982 -- 10 months before McClintock won a Nobel for her discovery of mobile DNA elements more than three decades earlier.

Today, CSIRO Plant Industry is the flagship for agricultural biotechnology research in Australia, and one of the world's leading plant genetic engineering institutions.

Under Peacock's leadership, the division has made major advances in both fundamental and applied research.

The discovery of McClintock's gene-silencing Ds element proved portentous -- Jim Haselhoff and Wayne Gerlach developed the 'designer' ribozyme system Gene Shears in the late 1980s, and in 1995, Dr Peter Waterhouse demonstrated the first use of double-stranded RNA interference (dsRNAi) in a crop, with a dsRNAi construct that protected tobacco against a virus infection.

CSIRO PI researchers helped rescue Australia's cotton industry from oblivion in the 1980s, introducing a computer-based management model that reduced pesticide consumption and the risk of pest resistance while improving yields.

It also bred elite cotton varieties like Siokra and Siora varieties, which were subsequently engineered with Monsanto's Cry 1Ac delta-endotoxin gene to create Australia's first transgenic, pesticide-resistant cotton cultivars.

Ingard crops, which account for about 30 per cent of all cotton production, reduce pesticide consumption by around 50 per cent. New Bollgard 2 varieties developed by CSIRO released this year are expected to account for 80 per cent of production within a few seasons, with further massive reductions in pesticide use. After eight seasons, there is still no sign of Bt resistance in pest populations.

Transgenic cotton was the second genetically modified organism (GMO) to be released into the Australian environment for commercial use.

The first -- indeed, the first GMO released anywhere in the world -- was a benign variant of Agrobacterium tumifaciens, developed by Prof Allen Kerr, of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute in Adelaide, to protect young stone-fruit trees against crown gall disease.

The Waite precinct houses the largest plant biotech research cluster in the southern hemisphere -tenants include CSIRO PI's horticultural research headquarters, the South Australian Research and Development Institute, the Australian Wine Research Institute, and the new $60 million Australian Centre for Functional Plant Genomics.

Wine and wheat are the Waite precinct's focal crops -- the DNA markers used to establish the pedigrees of the great Australian wines like cabernet sauvignon and sauvignon blanc were developed here, and advanced genomics and proteomics tools are being used to explore how vines respond to subtle changes in climate, soils and management techniques.

The Cooperative Research Centre for Plant Molecular Biology in Melbourne is rapidly becoming a powerhouse for research into grain crops -- wheat, barley and oats -- and pasture grasses.

CSIRO Forestry and Forest Products in Canberra has developed a unique methodology for accelerated breeding of eucalypts for plantation forestry - it cuts the time required to develop elite breeding lines from more than two decades to less than two years.

Australia has been plagued for the greater part of its 216-year history of European settlement by plagues of mammalian pests -- the rabbit, fox, cat and house mouse. They cause enormous damage to agriculture, and native ecosystems, and have pushed many native mammals and birds to the brink of extinction -- and beyond.

The Cooperative Research Centre for Pest Animal Control has developed a unique biological weapon to control mammalian pests: virally vectored immunosterilisaton (VVIS). It employs genetically modified viruses selected to infect the target pest exclusively. The virus is engineered to provoke the female mammal's immune system to make antibodies against proteins that form the protective, jelly-like zona pellucida around the egg, preventing fertilisation.

The CRC is preparing to submit an application to the Federal Office of the Gene Technology Regulator to conduct the first field trial of VVIS - a transgenic mouse cytomegalovirus, that will prevent mouse plagues by rendering virtually 100 per cent of females sterile before mouse numbers can proliferate.

Fear factor

There was an eight-year hiatus between the release of Australia's first GMO -- Kerr's modified Agrobacterium, in 1988 -- and its second, CSIRO's Ingard cotton, in 1996.

No other GMO has been released in the eight years since 1996. Monsanto Australia and Bayer CropScience have both received permission from the OGTR to release genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant (GMHT) canola varieties to conduct field trials, but in the face of virulent opposition from anti-GM groups, all of the state and territory governments in Australia have imposed multi-year moratoria on the crop.

The moratoria effectively apply to all GM crops. The way in which all state governments except Queensland have succumbed to the anti-GM movement's campaign of misinformation, and their second-guessing of the Gene Technology Regulator, have angered and dismayed the agbiotech research and business community, and cast a pall over the industry.

Researchers are stymied, and frustrated at the prospect of not being able to field test Australian-developed transgenic field crops for at least three years. There are also concerns about the possibility of a flight of agbiotech investment capital from Australia.

Meanwhile, across the Tasman Sea, the New Zealand government lifted a moratorium on field trials of GMOs, after a Royal Commission found that GM crops were not inherently unsafe or a threat to the environment, and that the country could not afford to ignore the commercial potential of agricultural biotechnology.