Canberra, Australia
April 21, 2004
Cotton Seed Distributors
- Web on Wednesday
 Danny,
can you give us an overview of some of the biotech projects that
you and your team here are running at the moment?
OK Adam, we’ve got a number of different aspects
of the work that’s going on here. A major component of it really
is to provide molecular support to our transgenic
cotton-breeding program based in Narrabri and that involves
quite a bit of out time.
But the other component of it is to carry out some basic
research into various aspects of the cotton plant that may in
the longer term lead us to new products, which can be used as
transgenics. This includes various things like looking at fibre
development.
Obviously the output of a cotton plant is the fibre that you
harvest but we have very little understanding about the basic
molecular biology of hoe fibred develop on seeds so there are a
number of projects going on at the moment using some of the
latest technologies to try and get a better understanding of
what genes are actually involved in the production of the cotton
fibre with the long-term view hopefully of being able to
manipulate fibre growth and development to improve quality
characteristics of cotton varieties at the moment.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the
technique you are using; the Micro array technique?
Yes, basically micro arrays are a new technology,
part of a group of technologies that are grouped in terms of
genomics, which is really to look at large numbers of genes
rather than, in the past we’ve been able to isolate and
characterise and manipulate single genes at a time but a lot of
biological processes really don’t involve single genes, they
involve large sets of genes that work together to produce a
particular characteristic in a plant.
So some of these new technologies really just allow us to look
at many different genes at a single time and one of those is
using things called micro arrays, which are basically gene
sequences which are spotted onto a glass slide, which allow us
to probe the expression of different genes under different
conditions.
For example we have here one of the micro arrays which we have
on here about 10,000 different cotton gene sequences which we’re
starting to use to look some of the genes which are involved in
the early processes of cotton fibre initiation and this has led
us to find a couple of candidate genes which we can now start to
look at in more detail to see what their role id in fibre
development and that’s part of a CRDC funded project as well as
a projects funded by CSD.
There is some other work going on, on oils. I
know it’s not your work but can you tell us a little bit about
that?
Yes there’s another group here in our oil seed
modification group in plant industry that are working on trying
to improve the nutritional qualities of the oil that are
produced by cotton. In general the oil that’s in the cottonseed
is really a bi-product of cotton fibre production but using
transgenic technologies now we can start to manipulate the types
of oils that are found in the seed to try and improve the value
of the cottonseed either for nutritional purposes or for even
industrial purposes and so there are a number of projects which
are moving ahead in the first field trial work is starting on
some of those in the coming year of cottonseed with improved
nutritional qualities, which hopefully will open up the market
for cotton oil as an end product for cotton fibre production.
Can you talk a little bit about the work and your
interaction with the office of the gene technology regulator?
Yes over the years I’ve had a very close involvement with the
Australian regulatory bodies who control the release of
transgenic organisms out into the environment initially with
GMAC, the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Committee and them more
recently with the OGTR which is the statutory body that’s
replaced GMAC. We’ve been working very closely with them to try
and define all the appropriate conditions for releasing
transgenic cotton out into the field in the safest possible
manner and this has also required us to do a lot of experimental
work to demonstrate that once we put these genes out into the
environment that we can contain them in field trials and not
have them spread around the country. So, we’ve worked very
closely with them to try and formulate the safest and the most
open and transparent system of regulation of anywhere in the
world for transgenic organisms.
Further Information: Robert
Eveleigh, John
Marshall,
or
Craig McDonald |
