CSIRO, Bayer in RNAi deal

International agbiotech company Bayer CropScience has acquired a licence from CSIRO to develop new crops using the patented RNA interference (RNAi) gene-silencing technology developed by CSIRO Plant Industry researchers.

The agreement, announced today, is CSIRO's first licensing of its already widely used plant gene-silencing technology to a major agbiotech company.

Bayer CropScience's head of bioscience research, Dr Michiel van Lookeren Campagne, has described it as a "key milestone in the long-standing collaboration" between CSIRO and his company.

Bayer has taken out a worldwide licence that allows it to develop, market and sell certain major crops developed with double-stranded RNA (dsRNAi) gene silencing, also known as 'hairpin' technology.

Plant Industry deputy chief Dr TJ Higgins said CSIRO's gene silencing technology had obvious applications to GM crops already commercialised by Bayer CropScience, notably canola and cotton, as well as to rice.

Higgins said that, under the agreement, CSIRO would retain exclusive rights to apply dsRNAi gene-silencing to cotton within Australia, and to he nation's most important cereal crop, wheat.

Bayer CropScience Bioscience spokesman Tony Ariolo said details of the agreement with CSIRO were confidential, but the company planned to use dsRNAi gene silencing both as a research tool, and to develop new crops.

He acknowledged that cotton and canola were "of major interest", but said Bayer CropScience would also use the technique as a basic research tool to understand patterns of gene expression underlying traits like disease resistance, quality and yield.

Ariolo said that, given continuing community concerns about GM crops, identification of the key genes contributing to these traits would be a first step towards selecting superior genotypes that conventional breeders could use to develop improved, non-GM crops.

Universal potential

Dr Peter Waterhouse's Plant Industry research team first demonstrated RNAi-mediated gene silencing in 1995, by showing it could protect transgenic tobacco plants against tobacco ringspot virus, by destroying the virus' genetic blueprint.

Apart from its use in switching off plant genes, RNAi is a potentially universal tool for protecting crops against virus diseases.

Waterhouse's Plant Industry colleague Dr Alan Green is using RNAi gene-silencing to modify the oil-synthesis pathway in cottonseed. The aim is to develop transgenic cotton plants whose oil will require little or no hydrogenation -- the manufacturing process used to turn liquids and oils into solids -- which unavoidably generates cholesterol-raising trans fatty acids.

Australian edible-oil producers already crush around 100,000 tonnes of cottonseed annually -- around 30 per cent from insect-resistant GM cottons -- to make margarine and cooking oil.

Low-trans cottonseed cooking oils and margarine, like the current generation of mono-unsaturated products made from canola and olive oil, would be one of the first GM crops to deliver direct benefits to consumers, in the form of improved cardiovascular health.