Go8 China-Australia Fellow

Matt Gilliham received one of 16 nationally awarded Go8 Fellowships to help facilitate collaboration with leading Chinese laboratories.

He visited Beijing. China from 16th-24th November, and it was a very enjoyable and productive visit. During his visit he gave presentations and discussed projects of mutual interest.

New collaborations with 3 laboratories have been establish and are likely to involve exchange of
students and staff between the China and Australia in the near future.

These collaborations are with:

Professor Lijuan Qiu, Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Agricultural Academy of Sciences
(Salt tolerance in soybean)

Professor Lai-hua Liu, China Agricultural University
(Plant Glutamate Receptors)

Professor Wenhao Zhang, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences
(Plant aluminium tolerance)

He also snuck in a visit to the Great Wall...photos to follow.

2012 SA Tall Poppy Award

Matthew accepting his award from
the South Australian Governor
Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce.

Dr Matthew Gilliham was named as a SA Tall Poppy of Science at a ceremony at Government House. This is one of eight awards that recognise the State's best early career researchers. For more details see this blog from the Waite Research Institute.

The Tall Poppy campaign, established by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science (AIPS), promotes public awareness of Australia's intellectual achievements. These awards acknowledge outstanding work by early career researchers and the significance of their research to the broader community.

PCP Lab @ COMBIO

Talks will be given by PCP Lab PhD Students Bo Xu (salt tolerance in wheat) on Wednesday morning and Sam Henderson (salt tolerance in grapevine) on Thursday afternoon at COMBIO this September. Other members will be giving posters too, Bo Li and Jiaen Qiu (salt tolerance in Arabidopsis), Brad Hocking (composition of grape cell walls) and Sunita Ramesh (control of organic anion efflux).

Matt Gilliham will also be co-charing a symposium on plant nutrient and water transport with Mel Zeppel from Monash on Wednesday morning. Come along and hear some cool stuff.

Invited speaker @ Food Security 2012

Food Security: Science, Sustainability and Governance, to be held on 27-28 September 2012 will address the challenges facing food security and will bring together business, industry, government, and academics to discuss practical solutions for local and global concerns.

http://www.informa.com.au/conferences/food-conference/food-security-science-sustainability-and-governance

Salt tolerant wheat - Nature Biotechnology

Our paper on improving the salt tolerance of wheat was published by Nature Biotechnology in March. It is the first study to show a considerable improvement in the salinity tolerance of a cereal crop in the field through the manipulation of a particular gene - we demonstrated a 25% increase in grain yield compared to the parental variety. The work was the result of a strong collaboration with our colleagues at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra, Rana Munns and Richard James, and other research agencies including the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics. 

The paper has since received considerable interest from around the world, both from the scientific community and the media.

For a lay summary of the work see our Scientific American article.

A few of the media stories and links to audio see below.

Austrade
BBC World Service (after 8m20s)

ABC Radio Bush Telegraph
ABC Radio AM
ABC Radio National
The Australian
The Times of India
New Scientist

Also an interesting report that includes the view of the farmer involved in the study.

Reportage

 

Invited talk @ 4th Grapevine Research Co-ordination Network Meeting

Matt Gilliham will give an invited talk at the 4th Annual Grapevine Research Co-ordination meeting on rootstock genomics. The meeting will be held in Corvallis Oregon in July 2012. See here for the meeting website.

Invited talk @ ASPB in US

Matt Gilliham will give an invited talk at the ASPB meeting in Houston Texas on the 21st July in the Metal Stress symposium on the role of HKT in salinity tolerance in wheat. http://my.aspb.org/?page=Meeting_MiniSymposia

PCP Lab @ the Gordon Conference on Salt Stress

Sam Henderson (PhD Student) working on salinity tolerance in grapevines and Steve Tyerman (COE CI), on root to shoot hydraulic signalling, will present their work at the Gordon Conference in Hong Kong at the end of June. Our collaborator Rana Munns from CSIRO PI will also present a talk, which will include our work on improving the salt tolerance of wheat.

Wine science innovation award

Matt Gilliham was the recipient of the Viticulture & Oenology 2012 Science and Innovation Award for Young People in Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry awarded by the Commonwealth Government and sponsored by the Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation.

The award will fund a project that will map the genetic make-up of a grapevine rootstock that is vitally important to the wine industry using next generation sequencing. By mapping the genome it will provide the first step in identifying the genes that confer the favourable traits of rootstocks such as phylloxera and nematode resistance, and drought and salinity tolerance. This will also allow the identification of markers for these traits and the acceleration of rootstock breeding programs.

The project will be carried out in collaboration with researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology (Prof. Jim Whelan and Dr Estelle Giraud) and the University of Verona, Italy (Profs. Mario Pezzotti & Massimo Delledone, Dr. Alberto Ferrarini). The team based at the Waite Campus includes Sam Henderson, a graduate student in the lab, and Rob and Mandy Walker at CSIRO Plant Industry.

Here are links with additional information.

Waite Research Institute
University of Adelaide
ABC Radio - audio coming soon