World leading facility opened

The $7 million laboratory could slash breeding times by more than half from the identification of a beneficial trait to a commercial crop variety hitting the market, according to Victorian Government molecular plant breeding research leader Tony Slater. The major advances will come in terms of increased capacity to measure plant growth, development and function. The additional data will allow scientists to identify potentially beneficial crop traits, such as drought or toxicity tolerance much quicker.

The centre is equipped with automated visible and hyperspectral cameras, which will take multiple photos of individual plants a day, with the information fed into a data analysis program.

“This facility really is going to assist both Victorian and Australian grain production in terms of the development of new grain varieties,” said Victorian Agricultural Minister Jaala Pulford at the opening.  “Cutting edge technology such as this will ensure the future prosperity of Victoria’s $11.6 billion agriculture industry.” Dr Slater said the centre would be the leading facility of its type in Australia. He said it would work in perfectly with other grains industry assets at Grains Innovation Park in Horsham, such as the Australian Grains Genebank. “The genebank holds around 300 million seeds, so there is plenty of genetic material there for scientists to work with,” Dr Slater said.

He said the facility would be used to identify traits in all crop types. “It really will revolutionise pre-breeding programs across Australia. Compared to the old manual systems of monitoring plant development, this will be a quantum leap.” Dr Slater said a super computer equipped with algorithms to interpret the data would make data analysis easier.

“There is a vast amount of data generated from the equipment in the centre, but the computer we used has three terrabytes of random access memory (RAM), so it is capable of dealing with a lot of numbers.”