Plant genomics centre gets new funding boost

The NSW Centre for Agricultural Genomics will expand, after recieving its first injection of funds from the NSW government's BioFirst program.

BioFirst has pledged $7.2 million to the centre over five years.

Dr Liz Dennis, Leader of the Genomics and Plant Development program at CSIRO Plant Industry, said the centre, established in November last year, was the first initiative of its kind in Australia, bringing together different expertise in proteomics, bioinformatics, genomics and agriculture for plant genomics.

So far the centre has received $400,000. Next year, providing it reaches its milestones, the funding will rise to $1.8 million for the year. Its team - based in Wagga Wagga, Sydney and Canberra - will be boosted by another 14 employees over the next two years.

The BioFirst money has gone into collaborations between NSW Agriculture, CSIRO Plant industry, the Australian Proteome Analysis Facility at Macquarie University, and the CSIRO's Centre for Mathematics and Information Science.

"The aim is to use the new technology to improve agriculture," Dennis said.

Three of the centre's projects involve improving wheat quality, mutating genes in rice to improve agricultural performance, and using microarray technology for aluminium tolerance in wheat and fiber quality in cotton.

"We do microarray technology [in regional NSW] and CSIRO provides the bioinformatics processing based out of Sydney," Dennis said.