April 29, 2003

The University of Queensland (UQ) has been awarded over $1 million to assist research aimed at providing disadvantaged farmers in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand with drought-resistant rice varieties.

The Rockefeller Foundation provided the grant to Professor Shu Fukai and Adjunct Professor Ken Fischer from UQ’s School of Land and Food Sciences to help fund their research. Their work is attempting to identify the physiological characters that provide drought tolerance for the rainfed rice systems in the Mekong region of Asia.

Professor Fukai said part of the research would be conducted through partnerships between UQ and the National Agricultural Research Systems in the region.

"We are aiming to find rice plants and varieties that will cope with drought," Professor Fukai said.

"Rice is the most important food source in the world with over two billion people relying on rice for their daily food supply.

"Cambodia, Laos and Thailand are countries that don’t have irrigation water to grow rice so around 70 percent of their rice fields simply rely on rainfall."

In addition to identifying drought resistant traits the research will also complement other programs that aim to identify the genes responsible for this resistance.

Professor Fischer said rice was the first major cereal with a fully sequenced genome. He said the next step in using the genetic information would be to fully understand the function of the fully sequenced genes.

"Once the genes for drought tolerance are identified researchers can use molecular tools to improve the efficiency of developing rice plants by identifying the particular genes that make certain plants more resistant," he said.

Professor Fischer said the grant would help fund the use of biotechnology tools that match the responses of different rice varieties to their genetic makeup. The money will also support a research fellow based at UQ.

"The Rockefeller Foundation has supported an international program of rice biotechnology for over 17 years. It has assisted with the training of more than 400 scientists and has invested over $100 million in rice biotechnology," he said.

Professor Fischer said the UQ team had been conducting research over the past 10 years to understand the physiological basis of the response of rice to drought. He said they had begun looking at the varieties that performed better in dry conditions.

"By using the new biotechnology tools we can identify the prime performers and locate the genes that make certain plants more drought resistant than others," he said.

Professor Fukai said several former postgraduate students who had travelled from Cambodia, Laos and Thailand to study at UQ were still continuing with the project after returning to their home countries.