My own lab is interested in parasite control – mechanisms that control parasitic

diseases in sheep and cattle. The main focus of our work is a parasite called liver

fluke .It's a flat worm parasite that infects animals and humans – a significant

problem in Australia and an enormous problem around the world.

AgriBio has been designed to be inherently flexible into the future. It's

designed under a public-private partnership model, and the intent through all of

the design process has been to design a facility which is going to be capable of

delivering high-end science solutions for the next 25 years. So there's quite a

lot of crystal ball gazing in there, but we believe it's going to offer a facility

with world-class capabilities for growing plants and animals under various

levels of containment, and to really facilitate the collaboration between La

Trobe scientists and DPI staff.

The research that I'll perform at AgriBio will be mainly to continue with our

subsoil manuring work. This is a new technology we've developed. It involves

incorporating large amounts of organic matter into the subsoil. It transforms

the subsoil. There's a lot still we need to understand about the basic function of

the technology.

I work on plant diseases, looking at identification of plant diseases for plant

pathogens that are biosecurity pathogens, but also for long-term control of

pathogens on plants.

My research mainly covers four areas. The first one is looking at plant-soil

interactions, with a focus on rhizosphere chemistry and biochemistry. The

second area is impacts of climate change on soil processes. So these two projects

cover the effect of warming and the effect of elevated CO2 on the soil in the carbon

and nitrogen cycle. And the third area is in soil management, with a focus on the

management of soil acidity. And the final area is phytoremediation.

In terms of impacts from this research, it's all about transforming the soil. It

enables us to increase rainfall use efficiency. It enables us to store, capture

and use extra rainfall in our crops, and to use it late in reproductive

development, which means it's used very efficiently. This delivers huge

productivity gains, and improvements in water use.

Probably the two major impacts I would envisage would be that one or two of the

molecules that we identify from our protein work could be worked up to be a

value-added vaccine. We would make a recombinant protein and evaluate that

protein in large animals, and if the initial trials were successful, we could then

talk to pharmaceutical companies to further develop those molecules as

commercial vaccines.

What we're working on is looking for long-term control options with plant

diseases. One of the pathogens I work on attacks apples, and we're working with

plant breeders to try and get apples that don't need spraying for example, in the

future. AgriBio will provide us with superb new facilities that are quarantine

containment and physical containment that allows us to do ou molecular work on

plant pathogens as well as marvellous glasshouses and new growth containment

facilities.

The main facilities which can help my research is the suite of world-class

glasshouses.

In terms of new research opportunities, AgriBio for me is going to open up a whole

new world of molecular biology. I'm basically an agronomist, working with crops

and soils, but we need to use the new tools in molecular biology to understand the

genes, the DNA, to help us understand what's going on. This opportunity will be

available with DPI in AgriBio because they have the people, they have the tools.

The benefits of AgrBio is that it's a collaboration between La Trobe University

scientists, and scientists from the Department of Primary Industries Victoria.

It will bring together over 400 scientists, staff and students from both

organisations in a collaborative institute that we hope will drive the future of

Victorian agriculture and biological sciences.

International collaborations mainly involve working with pharma groups,

pharma research driven groups across Australia, southern Australia and the

cropping areas from Western Australia to NSW working on this new technology –

subsoil manuring. We've recently made contact with a group of Punjab in India,

again trying to introduce our technology into their farming systems where they

have these problem subsoils.

One of the major collaborations I have is looking at the genomes of a couple of plant

pathogens – things that infect apples and pears, and looking at the sequence of

these fungi – their whole genome sequence. I'm working with New Zeland scientists

at the plant and food research organisation as well as scientists from Inra in

France, and a new collaboration with Korean scientists looks at a fungus that

infects nashi pear which we currently don't have in Australia.

When we relocate to AgriBio with colleague from DPI I anticipate that we'll be

working closely with the soils group. They have mastered the techniques of

identifying soil microbes using their molecular tools. We need to master those

techniques for our technology and I'm looking forward very much to actually

working with that group.