Work to begin on LaTrobe plant bioscience facility

Work will begin this year on a $AUD17 million Plant Biosciences Facility at LaTrobe University's Research and Development Park in the northern Melbourne suburb of Bundoora.

LaTrobe's deputy vice-chancellor of research, Prof Fred Smith, said the new facility would eventually accommodate about 100 scientists, working to improve the quality and productivity of grain, pasture horticultural species.

A joint venture between the university, government and private industry, it will be the third of its type in Australia -- South Australia and Queensland already have similar plant biotechnology precincts.

The Victorian government recently approved a $7.8 million Science and Technology Innovation (STI) grant for the project. Agriculture Victoria's own Plant Biotechnology Centre, which has been housed at the university for eight years, will be a key partner.

Other members of the founding consortium are the university, through its Centre for Sustainable Production, RMIT and Monash Universities, and Nufarm's plant biotech subsidiary Florigene, which will relocate its laboratories from Collingwood to Bundoora.

The new facility will act as an incubator for plant biotechnology companies, and will also employ a Canadian innovation -- a 'research hotel' to temporarily accommodate promising new biotechnology ventures.

The facility will give small research groups shared access to advanced research equipment, including computer hardware and software, and microarray chips for investigating gene function, that would normally be beyond their budgets.

Prof Roger Parish, head of LaTrobe's School of Life Sciences, said the facility would aim to give Victorian agriculture a critical edge, by developing crops that were more adapted to their environment, more resistant to pests and disease, and more economical in their use of soil nutrients and water.

Parish said one focus would be to identify genes for frost tolerance, which could dramatically improve the yield of cereal crops.

"Most of the that could be used to improve crop frost tolerance are covered by American patents, but we have identified and cloned some of our own, from Arabidopsis," he said.

"Developing improved pastures is another focus. We're investigating the genes involved in lignification. We're studying expressed sequence tags (ESTs) in species like annual ryegrass and fescue, to find patentable genes.

"We have to identify important plant genes, and develop our own intellectual property -- otherwise we will have to pay people in other countries for the right to use their genes.

"We just have to keep up with the pace -- there are still many plants to be studied, and much to be learned. We've just got to get on with it, or be left behind."