CRC students digging ethical minefields

Last week's Cooperative Research Centre Association conference revealed that ethical issues and public consultation are pertinent to the technological developments currently undertaken by Australian CRCs.

Dr John Heap developed a pasture plant while he was a postgraduate student at the CRC for Weed Management, and this week received an award for the work he carried out for the Adelaide-based CRC.

"Trials show the pasture plant can grow 10 times bigger than normal plants in contaminated soil," he said. 'This increased pasture production also increases animal production."

The new pasture grass could boost Australia's annual sheep production by $45 million, the CRC said, and should be on the market within a few years.

Heap said he did not use gene transfer technology to develop the pasture plant. He told Australian Biotechnology News that if there had been more public acceptance, gene transfer could have been a quicker approach.

Meanwhile, another postgraduate award finalist, Megan Hemming from the CRC for Tropical Plant Protection, has plans to use another type of controversial genetic approach to overcome a fungal disease that damages crops including tomatoes, bananas and cotton.

Fusarium wilt, a disease that currently causes huge losses to Australia's $1.3 billion cotton industry and $250 million banana industry, has a possible genetic solution she says.

She has discovered the gene that fights off the fungus in tomatoes and now she believes the easiest approach to overcome the problem is to transfer the "fix-it" gene into other tomato varieties that are affected by the disease. If that works, it could also be transferred into bananas and cotton.