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- ASPS Life Member Emeritus Professor Rana Munns
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Special Bulletin
05 April 2017
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The impact of drought on Australian pulse crops
05 April 2017
ASPS poster award winner Michael Dodt tells a story about his success at COMBIO 2016
My PhD research has focussed on improving our understanding of the impact that drought stress has on Australian pulse crops. My research mainly revolves around four areas of study: photosynthetic responses to drought, root morphology / architecture; crop modelling (APSIM) and transcriptomics (RNA-Seq). A major part of my project has been establishment and evaluation of a novel chemical seed pre-treatment to enhance root development of commercial crops for improved drought tolerance. This fits into our team’s larger project aimed at improving biotic and abiotic stress tolerance of a range of crop species as well as improving nutritional value of crops. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present at COMBIO in 2016 and was thrilled to win the best poster award. COMBIO provided an excellent opportunity to gain experience presenting at a conference and I highly recommend it to all early career researchers – especially if you’re nervous about presenting. This is a great opportunity to gain exposure and confidence in the scientific community. It is an excellent event for PhD students since it’s big and broad enough to fit in comfortably while networking with top tier scientists from multiple disciplines. Speakers were fantastic and there were plenty of opportunities for interaction. I look forward to my next opportunity.
Email: michaeldodt1@gmail.com
Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities, QUT, Brisbane.
March GPC E-bulletin
05 April 2017
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March Global Plant Council E-Bulletin
05 April 2017
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Sambasivam Periyannan – 2016 ASPS Peter Goldacre Award recipient shares his story of success
09 March 2017
SECURING GLOBAL FOOD PRODUCTION BY
RAPID ISOLATION OF WHEAT RUST DISEASE RESISTANCE GENES
Born and raised among the tropical plants on a small farm in Southern India, I never dreamed of becoming a researcher instead of a farmer. With a Master’s in Plant Pathology and a short exposure to the management of diseases in horticultural crops, in 2007, I had the opportunity to migrate to Australia to undertake a PhD at Plant Breeding Institute (PBI), University of Sydney. Until the time, I didn’t realise that PBI is the pioneering centre for fundamental studies on plant-pathogen interactions. With the outbreak of the deadly stem rust fungus Ug99 in East Africa, my PhD project was specifically focused on the molecular genetics of wheat stem rust resistance. At PBI, I was working with Drs Harbans Bariana and Urmil Bansal who are world renowned expertise in identifying and charateristing novel rust resistance genes in wheat. With a year of training on rust pathogenicity, in 2008, I moved to Dr Evans Lagudah’s lab at CSIRO, Canberra to continue the project towards rust resistance gene cloning. I was so excited to join Evan’s lab as it is one among the very few labs of the world which are successful in cloning rust disease resistance genes from the complex wheat genome. Given the complex nature of the wheat genome, it was a challenging project for PhD training. But with emergence of Ug99 as a major threat to global food security, I was highly motivated to succeed and I cloned the first stem rust resistance gene Sr33 from wheat. Further enthusiasm came when the results were published in Science (with cover page highlights) capturing the attention of several media outlets including BBC news (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23084782).
Du
ring that time, I realised that the wheat and the plant science community as a whole was in need of a robust method for isolating disease resistance genes as the conventional map-based gene cloning was tedious and time consuming. Using the resources of Sr33 and in collaboration with Drs Brande Wulff (at John Innes Centre) and Jonathan Jones’ lab (The Sainsbury Laboratory) at Norwich (UK), a rapid resistance gene cloning tool called “Mutagenesis and Resistance gene enrichment and Sequencing (MutRenSeq)” was developed to identify resistance genes within two years, whilst the map-based approach on average requires five years. This new technology was further validated by the successful isolation of two additional stem rust resistance genes, Sr22 and Sr45, which like Sr33, were effective against Ug99 and other wheat stem rust races. Along with the publication of this method in Nature Biotechnology (as a cover page article), the technique holds a patent in the USA. Apart from wheat, this robust gene cloning technique is currently being extended to other agricultural crops such as barley, soybean, potato, tomato and rye.
With the above achievements, I was fortunate to win the prestigious ASPS “Peter Goldacre Award”. This award contributed to my success in winning a highly competitive Australian Research Council “Discovery Early Career Researcher Award”. My gratitude for both awards has fuelled my hunger for future research success, where I am now identifying the signalling elements and molecular pathways of the cloned rust resistance genes in pathogen infected wheat. As plant pathogens evolve rapidly and become a major problem for securing food production and sustainable agriculture, knowledge of disease resistance gene function is required to help innovate a new generation of robust crops with durable resistance to multiple pathogen varieties.
I would like to acknowledge Sydney University, ACIAR, Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project and Grains Research and Development Corporation for the scholarship and the research grant to undertake the aforementioend studies. Finally, I thank Drs TJ Higgins, Jeff Ellis and Evans Lagudah at CSIRO for nominating me for the prestigous ASPS Goldacre Award.
Email: Sambasivam.Periyannan@csiro.au
References:
- Steuernagel B#, Periyannan S#, Hernandez-Pinzon I, Witek K, Rouse M, Yu G, Hatta A, Ayliffe M, Bariana H, Jones J, Lagudah E, Wulff B (2016). Rapid cloning of disease-resistance genes in plants using mutagenesis and sequence capture. Nature Biotechnology 34:652-655 ( #joint first author)
- Periyannan S, Moore J, Ayliffe M, Bansal U, Wang X, Huang L, Deal K, Luo M, Kong X, Bariana H, Mago R, McIntosh R, Dodds P, Dvorak J, Lagudah E(2013).The gene Sr33, an ortholog of barley Mla genes, encodes resistance to wheat stem rust race Ug99. Science 341:786-788.
Call for 2017 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes
06 March 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day).
Dear ASPS member,
Entries and nominations are now open for the 2017 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes.
We are hoping you can help us reward great Australian science by promoting the following opportunities to your networks. Please read on for more information as well as some options for promotional blurbs you might be able to use in your internal and external communications, newsletters, website or social media.
There are 15 prizes on offer this year including one NEW prize:
Research & Innovation
o NSW Office of Environment and Heritage Eureka Prize for Environmental Research
o University of Technology Sydney Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science **NEW**
o UNSW Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research
o Australian Infectious Diseases Research Centre Eureka Prize for Infectious Diseases Research
o Johnson & Johnson Eureka Prize for Innovation in Medical Research
o ANSTO Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology
o Defence Science and Technology Eureka Prize for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia
o Macquarie University Eureka Prize for Outstanding Early Career Researcher
o UNSW Eureka Prize for Scientific Research
Leadership
o 3M Eureka Prize for Emerging Leader in Science
o CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science
o University of Technology Sydney Eureka Prize for Outstanding Mentor of Young Researchers
Science Engagement
o Department of Industry, Innovation and Science Eureka Prize for Innovation in Citizen Science
o Department of Industry, Innovation and Science Eureka Prize for Science Journalism
School Science
o University of Sydney Sleek Geeks Science Eureka Prize (Primary and Secondary School)
Key dates
Friday 10 February Entries open
7 pm AEST Friday 5 May Entries close
Friday 28 July Finalists announced
Wednesday 30 August Winners announced
ASPS President’s letter and updated executive and discipline representatives web pages
05 February 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day).
Hello ASPS members,
Meet your new Executive Committee and Discipline Representatives.
President’s Letter
By Sergey Shabala
University of Tasmania
Dear Colleagues,
From January 1 I have the responsibility of leading the ASPS for the next two years. This is a great honour and a privilege, and I will try my best to ensure that plant science in Australia maintains its high international profile and continues to enjoy the strongest possible reputation. I would like to use this opportunity to thank John Evans, as the outgoing President, for the fantastic job he has done over the last two years taking ASPS community through the harsh realities of a modern-day academic and political life. I would also like to thank the outgoing Honorary Treasurer, Brent Kaiser, and Honorary Secretary, Martha Ludwig for their sterling efforts in running of the society over this period. I look forward to working with the new committee and hope that we can serve our members equally as well.
Next year the ASPS will celebrate a major milestone – a 60th anniversary since its establishment. All this time Australian plant science has been at a forefront of international research. I believe that it may be highly appropriate to try to highlight our major milestones and summarise achievements of Australian plant science over this period in an article and then disseminate it via media, and would encourage someone to put a hand up for doing this. Do I hear any voices from volunteers?
Last year I attended several international meetings in my field and was pleased to see great representation from Australian researchers amongst delegates. We are also doing extremely well in international rankings when it comes to various metrics. Of 115 Australian highly cited scientists listed by Thompson Reuters in 2016, 18 belong to plant science community. We are also doing remarkably well in the overall rankings, being 5th country after USA, UK, Germany and China. For a country with such a small population, this is a commendable achievement. And while we all know about the difficulties in getting ARC grants, our current success rate (18%) is much higher that in many other countries. So, I believe we have all the reasons to be optimistic and look for more exciting developments in our field in the near future.
It would be very tempting for me to stop at this point and simply wish you best success in your work. Yet, I do not want to leave an impression that our road is covered by rose petals and we do not have issues. Similar to many other disciplines, Australian plant science is facing some big challenges. Some of them are under our control and therefore could be resolved in the short-term, while other are systemic and will require much more efforts and time. One of immediate issues is changing a format of our annual meetings. At the last Combio conference all founding societies have voted unanimously to move away from the existing format making Combio meetings bi-annual events, and having smaller (society-specific) conferences every alternating year. While these changes will be implemented only from 2019, we will need to start making plans much earlier. Other issues that our discipline is facing are (in no specific order): gender equality in Academic positions in Biological Sciences; collegiality and peer support in our discipline; the quality and integrity of peer review, both for publication and grants; proliferation of ‘predatory’ and poor quality journals; and scientific literacy in the public domain. While all these issues are not our discipline-specific, it is important that Australian Plant Sciences does its part in moving quickly towards resolving these or at least putting actions in place to initiate change.
Over the upcoming months the ASPS newsletter will feature viewpoints on these topics and more to stimulate discussion and propose ways in which our society can help promote change. For any of this to happen we need your input and support so we are calling for your active involvement – it is your society after all, and should be representing your views. You may also have additional things that the society should be working towards – so please get in touch.
This is all from me for now. I wish you a successful 2017 and hope it will be a year of new exciting discoveries, fruitful collaborations, and success for all of you.
Sergey Shabala
ASPS President’s letter and updated executive and discipline representatives web pages
05 February 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day).
Hello ASPS members,
Meet your new Executive Committee and Discipline Representatives.
President’s Letter
By Sergey Shabala
University of Tasmania
Dear Colleagues,
From January 1 I have the responsibility of leading the ASPS for the next two years. This is a great honour and a privilege, and I will try my best to ensure that plant science in Australia maintains its high international profile and continues to enjoy the strongest possible reputation. I would like to use this opportunity to thank John Evans, as the outgoing President, for the fantastic job he has done over the last two years taking ASPS community through the harsh realities of a modern-day academic and political life. I would also like to thank the outgoing Honorary Treasurer, Brent Kaiser, and Honorary Secretary, Martha Ludwig for their sterling efforts in running of the society over this period. I look forward to working with the new committee and hope that we can serve our members equally as well.
Next year the ASPS will celebrate a major milestone – a 60th anniversary since its establishment. All this time Australian plant science has been at a forefront of international research. I believe that it may be highly appropriate to try to highlight our major milestones and summarise achievements of Australian plant science over this period in an article and then disseminate it via media, and would encourage someone to put a hand up for doing this. Do I hear any voices from volunteers?
Last year I attended several international meetings in my field and was pleased to see great representation from Australian researchers amongst delegates. We are also doing extremely well in international rankings when it comes to various metrics. Of 115 Australian highly cited scientists listed by Thompson Reuters in 2016, 18 belong to plant science community. We are also doing remarkably well in the overall rankings, being 5th country after USA, UK, Germany and China. For a country with such a small population, this is a commendable achievement. And while we all know about the difficulties in getting ARC grants, our current success rate (18%) is much higher that in many other countries. So, I believe we have all the reasons to be optimistic and look for more exciting developments in our field in the near future.
It would be very tempting for me to stop at this point and simply wish you best success in your work. Yet, I do not want to leave an impression that our road is covered by rose petals and we do not have issues. Similar to many other disciplines, Australian plant science is facing some big challenges. Some of them are under our control and therefore could be resolved in the short-term, while other are systemic and will require much more efforts and time. One of immediate issues is changing a format of our annual meetings. At the last Combio conference all founding societies have voted unanimously to move away from the existing format making Combio meetings bi-annual events, and having smaller (society-specific) conferences every alternating year. While these changes will be implemented only from 2019, we will need to start making plans much earlier. Other issues that our discipline is facing are (in no specific order): gender equality in Academic positions in Biological Sciences; collegiality and peer support in our discipline; the quality and integrity of peer review, both for publication and grants; proliferation of ‘predatory’ and poor quality journals; and scientific literacy in the public domain. While all these issues are not our discipline-specific, it is important that Australian Plant Sciences does its part in moving quickly towards resolving these or at least putting actions in place to initiate change.
Over the upcoming months the ASPS newsletter will feature viewpoints on these topics and more to stimulate discussion and propose ways in which our society can help promote change. For any of this to happen we need your input and support so we are calling for your active involvement – it is your society after all, and should be representing your views. You may also have additional things that the society should be working towards – so please get in touch.
This is all from me for now. I wish you a successful 2017 and hope it will be a year of new exciting discoveries, fruitful collaborations, and success for all of you.
Sergey Shabala
January GPC E-bulletin
05 February 2017
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Cyclotides: small plant defence molecules to drive pharmaceutical innovation
01 February 2017
COMBIO 2016 winner of the ASPS Student Poster Awards
Georgianna Oguis
Institute for Molecular Bioscience – University of Queensland, Australia
Plants have evolved quite a number of ways to evade predators. An obvious strategy for an organism incapable of rapid movement out of danger is to produce toxins. Whilst the most notable plant defence molecules are small molecule secondary metabolites, there exists great many peptides that are also expressed in plants. One such class of these peptides are known as cyclotides, and these have special properties worth talking about. The discovery of cyclotides goes back to 1973 when Norwegian doctor Lorents Gran discovered that the active ingredient of the herbal tea African women drink in order to induce birth is apparently an ultrastable peptide that can survive boiling and oral ingestion1. Gran named the molecule kalata B1—after the local name of the plant kalata-kalata (Oldenlandia affinis). Since then many other cyclotide-related studies spawned. However, it was only in 1999 that the term “cyclotide” was coined; and these specifically pertain to head-to-tail cyclised plant peptides which have three disulfide bridges that are arranged to form a knotted topology2. Cyclotides are found to exhibit a range of biological activities including anthelminthic, cytotoxic, molluscicidal and antimicrobial activities3. Other than these, cyclotides have very promising applications both in agriculture and in peptide-based therapeutics—the former being the hypothesised evolutionary role as an insecticide and the latter which can be attributed to their ultrastable properties (brought about by its cyclic structure and knotted topology), thus be used as frameworks for peptide drug engineering.
Before the year concluded in 2016, the first cyclotide-based bioinsecticide called Sero-X was made commercially available. The product was developed and is being manufactured by the Australian-owned company InnovateAg. The insecticide is currently being applied to control pests on cotton and macadamia crops. Although there are yet no cyclotide-based peptide therapeutics on the market, the possibility of this scaffold appearing in a commercial product may not be that far off as several proofs of the concept have already been published3. The main idea behind this is to “graft” or replace a number of native cyclotide amino acids with specific sequences which can target cancer cells, adipocytes, cell receptors, and possibly many other targets. By having these sequences grafted into the cyclotide scaffold, we are able to create ultrastable peptide therapeutics that are highly specific and would not interfere with healthy cells. There is repeated emphasis on “ultrastability”, as this property is essential to improved peptide drug delivery and half-life. A particular peptide-based drug may be stable in vitro but when administered in vivo, an entire array of enzymes, compounds, acids and proteases plus the non-optimal environment can encumber peptide function, or lead to degradation. Another good point, or perhaps one of the best points of cyclotides, is that they are naturally produced in plants. This implies that we can utilise plants as biofactories for the production of these cyclotide-based therapeutics. The advantage of this plant-based system is that we are able to cheaply produce medicines in large quantities, making them affordable to all walks of life, especially to people in developing countries who will finally be given VIP access to life’s basic necessities.
My winning poster entry at ComBio 2016 entitled “The key drivers of cyclotide production in butterfly pea” is but a glimpse of a very big picture. I am part of a big group headed by Prof. David Craik, the driver of research in the areas of cyclotide therapeutic and plant biosynthesis of cyclotides. I would love to think of our group as a factory where we are categorised into several subgroups that are unified with a goal. For instance, the chemists and structural biologists synthesise and characterise the peptides. The cell biologists and biochemists subsequently test these peptides in vitro and in vivo. The molecular biologists and plant scientists then express the peptides of interest into the plants for possible mass production. I happened to be sitting at the end of the chain where my colleagues and I try to establish an optimised system for the production of pharmaceuticals in plants. The poster features one of the many aspects of production in plants we are looking at. In a nutshell, I want to know what drives cyclotide production in butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea), as this specific plant expresses chemically diverse cyclotides in all life stages and in such great abundance. Once I have characterised the key drivers, I can potentially use these to drive the production of cyclotide-based pharmaceuticals in other plant systems that are economically important. In other words, we need to identify the best driver to race the fastest car in a professional team, and hopefully cross that finish line first to bag the golden trophy.
References:
1 Gran L. On the effect of a polypeptide isolated from “Kalata-Kalata” (Oldenlandia affinis DC) on the oestrogen dominated uterus. Acta Pharmacol Toxicol. 1973;33:400–8.
2 Craik DJ, Daly NL, Bond T,Waine C. Plant cyclotides: a unique family of cyclic and knotted proteins that defines the cyclic cystine knot structural motif. J Mol Biol. 1999;294:1327–36.
3 Oguis GK, Kan MW, Craik DJ. Natural functions and structure-activity relationships of cyclotides. Adv Bot Res. 2015;76: 187-226.
Contact: Georgianna Oguis @ g.oguis@imb.uq.edu.au
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