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UWA PhD student Natasha Teakle seeks to unravel
the salt and waterlogging tolerance secrets of the
Lotus tenuis plant.
Image courtesy of FFI CRC

Water, food and good land to grow it on are basic necessities people will fight over by the time the world population reaches an estimated nine billion people in 2050.

But what if scientists could improve agriculture by developing new super crops to boost yields in the face of a global famine and disputes over water?

Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology hope to find new ways to feed the world's population by exploring the sequenced genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, a model plant species whose biological blueprint consists of 30,000 genes that control its growth and development.

ARC Federation Fellow and University of Western Australia researcher Steven Smith said scientists had worked out the function of about half of the sequenced genes.

"We still have lots of genes whose function we know nothing about," he told ScienceNetwork WA. "We want to know how the plant works, so it's still basic science."

Professor Smith said researchers have succeeded in boosting the amount of starch plants accumulated in their vegetative green tissues: "We have managed to persuade our plants to grow bigger and faster, so we have actually increased biomass in the lab by up to 50 per cent."

The next step is proving it in the real world where plants are tested by different environments in which water and nitrogen in the soil can be scarce or affected by salt, waterlogging or pollution.

"We recently discovered some genes that are central players in response to abiotic stresses, particularly water and salt stress," he said.

"By knocking out these genes, plants become sensitive to those stresses. So we can engineer it to give plants greater tolerance.

"This is very exciting basic research because the gene seems to be a key regulator in a wide range of stresses including flood tolerance, drought and salt stress."

Increase the salt tolerance and farmers can again start seeding salt-affected lands with genetically altered crops to feed the ever growing population increasing at an estimated 200,000 mouths a day.

Professor Smith said the technology would not transform agriculture in the short term but it helps scientists to better understand how it might be able to do so in the longer term.

"There is an important urgency for this work," he said.

Leading science communicator Julian Cribb warns that Australia must urgently prioritise agricultural science to find solutions to a likely global famine.

Delivering the 2008 UWA Hector and Andrew Stewart Free memorial lecture, the adjunct professor of science communication at the University of Technology Sydney said farmers will need to more than double food production using only two thirds of the currently available water.

"Barring nuclear wars, pandemics and cosmic accidents, there will be about 9.1 billion people in the world of 2050," he said. "But they will be eating as much food as 13 billion at today’s nutritional levels. The greatest issue confronting humanity in the next 50 years is not greenhouse, it is whether humanity can achieve and sustain such a harvest."

The creator of Future Harvest, a global public awareness campaign for the World Bank's consultative group on international agricultural research, called for a bigger investment in agricultural research and development and pointed to higher profits for farmers who invested in technologies such as those being developed in WA.

One of those involves the discovery of a perennial plant, Lotus tenuis, that has the ability to tolerate salinity and waterlogging.

UWA PhD student Natasha Teakle said anecdotal evidence suggested the legume was tolerant to waterlogging and grew in saline areas.

Ms Teakle is studying the physiological traits contributing to the plant's salt and waterlogging tolerance.

"The plant forms a lot of air spaces, aerenchyma, in the roots, which allows oxygen to go from the shoots to the roots even if the plant is waterlogged," she said. "They act in a similar way to a snorkel."

Ms Teakle has already identified some of the genes responsible for the plant's tolerance which could pave the way for profitable farming on marginal lands.