Love-ins and protests over, it's down to work for new Qld precinct

The newest superstar among Australian life science research centres, the Queensland Bioscience Precinct, is getting down to business after an official opening that was part love-in, part confrontation.

The confrontation was sparked by students protesting fee hikes who gate-crashed the formal debut of the $AUD105 million complex, Australia's largest and best-equipped human, animal and plant biology research facility.

Police responded by throwing a cordon across its main entrances which forced the demonstrators' target, Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson, to use a side entrance.

Nelson was among a bevy of national political, biobusiness and research leaders whose presence at the opening testified to the significance attached to the addition of QBP to Australia's research infrastructure.

Dominated by a seven-story main building, the complex is designed to advance bioscience collaborative research and commercialisation with emphasis on gene discovery, livestock and plant industry and the development of sustainable ecosystems.

The precinct holds four buildings on a 1.1 hectare site in the heart of the University of Queensland campus in Brisbane.

They are filling up with 700 scientists whose numbers will be more or less evenly split between the two main occupants of the site, the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) and CSIRO.

Led by Prof John Mattick, the IMB is the centrepiece of Queensland's biotech research efforts and straddles three major areas -- genomics and computational biology, cellular and developmental biology, plus structural biology and chemistry.

It is allied with partners, including the Australian Research Council's Special Research Centre for Functional and Applied Genomics and the Australian Genome Research Facility, which also occupy part of the QBP.

The CSIRO component of the precinct takes in its divisions of livestock industry, plant industry and sustainable ecosystems.

Fitted with ultra-modern labs plus facilities for supercomputing, X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance and advanced microscopy, the QBP can call on the Queensland government for $78.6 million over 10 years to help meet its operating budget.

Representatives of overseas research centres from San Francisco to Singapore who attended the opening praised the quality of the QBP facilities as well as the output of its tenant organisations. "In every sense, it is a world-class facility for modern biology," said combinatorial chemist Greg Petsko, co-head of the 25-scientist Petsko-Ringe structural biology lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

"The layout is fabulous, the instrumentation is state of the art and the quality of the people and the work they are doing is as good as you can ask for. My sense is that it will be a Mecca for visitors in many areas of science.

"I think the stuff going on here is absolutely at the cutting edge of biology, and positions Australia in the forefront of the new movement which is to look at biology more morphologically and less in a reductionist manner.

"It used to be you took the car apart to look at the individual components. Biology in the modern era is getting to the point where we have the parts list. Now it is interested in looking at the steering assembly and figuring out how things work as a unit.

"I would say that in the application of structural and chemical tools to biology, Australia was not at cutting edge for a long time, but it is catching up fast and the IMB is a big part of the reason for that."

Australian researchers were "right at the front" in areas such as cellular differentiation, Petsko said. But in others, such as enzymology (the study of proteins that catalyse reactions) "it has lagged behind for some time and needs to do some work there."