As spring arrives in Australia and the Jacarandas blooming in Queensland, it’s great to see lots of collaborations, research outputs, and events coming to fruition!
I would like to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate all of those who have volunteered their time to help produce and participate in Outreach initiatives over the last few months. The National Science Quiz was held at the end of last month with hundreds in attendance in-person and has amassed over 1.8K views on YouTube, we also had displays and workshops at several conferences and events (more on these in the news section below). Thank you everyone!
It has been a busy time for our Researcher Development Group (RDG) who this week held a writing retreat for our Early Career Researchers. I would like to say a massive thank you to Candice Bywater, Jazmine Humphreys, Arlie Macdonald, Ola Amoo, Caitlin Dudley and Melissa McKain for organising the event. Thank you also to Blake Chapman, Ananda Neihaus and Daniel Ortiz-Barrientos (Happy Birthday Daniel) whom participants were literally (pun intended) raving about afterwards. We also recently awarded our Centre ECR Capacity Building Grants, congratulations to all the recipient teams!
Just last week a thought-provoking Nature Commentary was published by Deputy Director Mark Cooper with various international Centre colleagues and others titled ‘Genetic modification can improve crop yields — but stop overselling it’. This work was led by a passionate PhD student Merritt Khaipho-Burch at Cornell University, who believes in promoting realistic expectations of gene discovery to crop improvement pipelines. The commentary was motivated by the increasing number of articles that make inferences of large yield increases, published in high profile journals, that were not based on well-established, high quality, approaches that are used for yield-testing in plant breeding. To pursue more impactful science, the authors urge researchers to work together much more than we currently do across a range of disciplines and to use well-established yield-testing approaches. This is exactly what the Centre also advocates and the article will hopefully stimulate discussion and successful collaboration on this on this important and complex issue to increase the chances of successful outcomes and accelerate impact from discovery research.
The article advocates that researchers, reviewers and journal editors should ensure that these five criteria are met:
- Studies should use standard definitions of yield.
- Trials should be replicated across plots, geographical locations and years.
- Varieties, planting densities and other conditions should closely match those on farms.
- Appropriate controls should be used including current varieties and ‘null constructs’.
- Researchers should prioritize genes that plant breeding might have missed.
These ideas will no doubt be expanded on at the upcoming GxExM Symposium II that we are jointly holding with the University of Florida on November 6 and 7 in Gainesville, Florida.
This is of course just one of many fantastic outputs we have had so far this year. Four publications have appeared in Nature Plants, including reviews as well as a major multi-omic resource for Nicotiana benthamiana. Other publications of potential broad use published this year include a resource for wild rice populations, techniques for monitoring plant water relations in the field and a method for quantifying conservative trait correlation.
Well done to everyone, I thoroughly enjoy reading all the research that is being produced through the Centre! Unfortunately, I can’t mention all the publications we have had this year, or name all the people behind them, but you can keep up to date via our website or this newsletter. If you think colleagues may like to benefit, please suggest they subscribe to the newsletter.
Last and certainly not least I would like to extend my personal congratulations to Chief Investigators Tim Brodribb and Robert Henry and Associate Investigator Lee Hickey. Tim was recently appointed as a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science and the Academy made a great video with Tim which is definitely worthwhile viewing. Lee will lead the ARC Training Centre in Predictive Breeding for Agriculture Futures and Robert will lead the ARC Research Hub for Engineering Plants to Replace Fossil Carbon, both based at The University of Queensland. I am excited about what this Training Centre and Research Hub means as a collaboration with our Centre and look forward to keeping you informed of the great work that will come out of these initiatives.
Professor Christine Beveridge FAA
Centre Director and ARC Laureate Fellow, The University of Queensland
