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May GPC E-Bulletin
05 June 2017
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GPC E-Bulletin and postdoc opportunity
29 May 2017
Hello ASPS members,
We have a new employment opportunity Research Associate in Hybrid Mimics.
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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.
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.
Global Plant Council February E Bulletin
06 March 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day).
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Global Plant Council February E Bulletin
06 March 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day).
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Antarctica trip? Apply by Feb 20th
10 February 2017
The Homeward Bound Initiative
By Sandra Kerbler
PhD Candidate at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology,
The University of Western Australia
If you could change one thing in the world today, what would it be? I’m sure many of you reading this will be thinking of certain political leaders right now, but what about the issues a little closer to home? The ones you face each and every day? What about those that are long engrained, such that we don’t even realise they are there sometimes? Seeing so many of my talented female colleagues leave science because it was just “too competitive” and that they “didn’t have what it takes,” the answer to this question was simple. For me, I would change the gender inequality in science and that’s why I took part in Homeward Bound.
Homeward Bound is a leadership and strategy program for women scientists, set against the backdrop of Antarctica. Created by Australian leadership expert Fabian Dattner in collaboration with Dr Jessica Melbourne-Thomas of the Australian Antarctic Division, the program aims to equip a 1000-strong global collaboration of women scientists with the ability to lead, influence and contribute to policy and decision making, over the next 10 years. Homeward Bound was an incredible experience for me. Not only did has it helped me develop the skills needed to succeed in the upper echelons of science, but being part of a larger collaborative of women, all with a science background and all at very different stages of their careers has been truly inspiring.
If you would similarly like to improve the gender inequality in science and enhance your ability to lead constructively, plan strategically and communicate effectively to both scientists and non-scientists alike, please consider applying for the next Homeward Bound voyage in 2018. Applications close on the 20th February, 2017. For more information, please visit: https://homewardboundprojects.com.au or alternatively contact me directly at: sandra.m.kerbler@gmail.com
Want to go to Antarctica? Apply by Feb 20
10 February 2017
The Homeward Bound Initiative
By Sandra Kerbler
PhD Candidate at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology,
The University of Western Australia
If you could change one thing in the world today, what would it be? I’m sure many of you reading this will be thinking of certain political leaders right now, but what about the issues a little closer to home? The ones you face each and every day? What about those that are long engrained, such that we don’t even realise they are there sometimes? Seeing so many of my talented female colleagues leave science because it was just “too competitive” and that they “didn’t have what it takes,” the answer to this question was simple. For me, I would change the gender inequality in science and that’s why I took part in Homeward Bound.
Homeward Bound is a leadership and strategy program for women scientists, set against the backdrop of Antarctica. Created by Australian leadership expert Fabian Dattner in collaboration with Dr Jessica Melbourne-Thomas of the Australian Antarctic Division, the program aims to equip a 1000-strong global collaboration of women scientists with the ability to lead, influence and contribute to policy and decision making, over the next 10 years. Homeward Bound was an incredible experience for me. Not only did has it helped me develop the skills needed to succeed in the upper echelons of science, but being part of a larger collaborative of women, all with a science background and all at very different stages of their careers has been truly inspiring.
If you would similarly like to improve the gender inequality in science and enhance your ability to lead constructively, plan strategically and communicate effectively to both scientists and non-scientists alike, please consider applying for the next Homeward Bound voyage in 2018. Applications close on the 20th February, 2017. For more information, please visit: https://homewardboundprojects.com.au or alternatively contact me directly at: sandra.m.kerbler@gmail.com
Homeward Bound
10 February 2017
The Homeward Bound Initiative
By Sandra Kerbler
PhD Candidate at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology,
The University of Western Australia
If you could change one thing in the world today, what would it be? I’m sure many of you reading this will be thinking of certain political leaders right now, but what about the issues a little closer to home? The ones you face each and every day? What about those that are long engrained, such that we don’t even realise they are there sometimes? Seeing so many of my talented female colleagues leave science because it was just “too competitive” and that they “didn’t have what it takes,” the answer to this question was simple. For me, I would change the gender inequality in science and that’s why I took part in Homeward Bound.
Homeward Bound is a leadership and strategy program for women scientists, set against the backdrop of Antarctica. Created by Australian leadership expert Fabian Dattner in collaboration with Dr Jessica Melbourne-Thomas of the Australian Antarctic Division, the program aims to equip a 1000-strong global collaboration of women scientists with the ability to lead, influence and contribute to policy and decision making, over the next 10 years. Homeward Bound was an incredible experience for me. Not only did has it helped me develop the skills needed to succeed in the upper echelons of science, but being part of a larger collaborative of women, all with a science background and all at very different stages of their careers has been truly inspiring.
If you would similarly like to improve the gender inequality in science and enhance your ability to lead constructively, plan strategically and communicate effectively to both scientists and non-scientists alike, please consider applying for the next Homeward Bound voyage in 2018. Applications close on the 20th February, 2017. For more information, please visit: https://homewardboundprojects.com.au or alternatively contact me directly at: sandra.m.kerbler@gmail.com
Media videos of Homeward Bound can be found here.
January GPC E-Bulletin
05 February 2017
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