Australia must embrace 'the new biology of genomics' to maintain its edge in world agriculture, says one of Australia's most eminent plant biologists.

Genomics - the study of an organism's genome - will allow agriculture to keep up with demands for year-round quality and variety while continuing to bring in billions of dollars in exports, says Dr Liz Dennis, Program Leader at CSIRO Plant Industry.

Dr Dennis sets out her vision for Australia's agriculture in the celebrated Brodie Hall lecture to be delivered in Perth, Western Australia, tomorrow night (2 November 2001).

"The quality and performance of our crop plants is one of the main reasons why Australia's agricultural industry is so successful and why we enjoy year-round quality and variety in our food," says Dr Dennis.

"We have plants that resist disease and insect attack for example, and still produce high yields of premium quality."

But to beat insects and disease in the future and manage other agronomic issues like salinity and water use, Dr Dennis says we have to make the process of developing new plant varieties more streamlined, better and faster.

"That means moving to the next level of understanding how plants work. So far molecular biology has unveiled a host of information about how plants work, like finding a master switch that controls flowering."

"Controlling this gene has the potential to allow extensive control over the flowering schedules of particular plants and crops, to coincide with market demands and favourable environmental conditions."

"To complement molecular biology, we've gone one step further with genomics, understanding the function of all the genes in a plant and then identifying those that are useful for agriculture or beneficial to human health," says Dr Dennis.

"Once we've identified those genes, we can think about how we can use them, which could be by breeding them into existing high performance cultivars, switching them on or off, or by transferring selected genes into an unrelated cultivar."

Scientists have previously worked with single genes, producing results such as cotton with in-built resistance to insect pests, but there are many thousands of genes in a plant. Arabidopsis, a small weed used for research, has 25,000 genes.

According to Dr Dennis, genes don't work in isolation but in pathways with other genes that are activated by triggers, like stress and climate.

"Genomics provides a big picture of a plant's genetic makeup. It makes finding individual genes among the many thousands in a plant much simpler and it lets us unlock whole gene pathways," says Dr Dennis.

"It can be applied to help understand the process of infection by plant diseases such as rusts and to identify how some plants can resist disease or grow under dry or waterlogged conditions."

"Once we unravel the pathways involved in these processes, we will be able to take action to beat plant disease without chemicals and develop plants that can perform under a wide range of conditions.

"This is a revolution in plant biology that Australia must embrace to gain the full benefit genomics can offer."

Dr Dennis shared the 2000 inaugural Prime Minister's Prize for Science for her work in isolating the flowering switch gene.

Dr Liz Dennis will deliver the Brodie Hall Lecture at 8pm, Friday 2 November 2001 at City West Function Centre, 45 Plaistowe Mews, West Perth.

More information:

Liz Dennis 08 9333 6620

Jane Kahler 02 6246 5077, 0419 494 137

Email Jane.Kahler@csiro.au

To display a larger version of the image above click here.

Fluorescent dyes are used to label genes and visualise gene activity. In this microarray, each dot represents a gene.