Our new cross-disciplinary centre, involving researchers at the University of Western Australia, La Trobe, the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide has been funded from 2014 to 2020.
Looking forward to getting started once all the funding agreements are signed!
The focus of the centre is examining how plants use energy, particularly under stress, and see if there are ways in which we can streamline these processes in crop plants to improve yield.
Our new website is now active and is currently being populated, it will eventually contain full details of our novel approaches and our sub-programs that are designed to get a handle on the key drivers of plant energy use.
Chief Investigators of the new centre are:
UWA - Proteomics, Signalling and Epigenetics
Harvey Millar (Centre Director)
Ian Small
Ryan Lister
Rana Munns
La Trobe - Metabolic signalling
Jim Whelan
ANU - Ecophysiology, natural variation and signalling
Barry Pogson
Owen Atkin
Justin Borevitz
Adelaide - Transport and signalling
Steve Tyerman
Matt Gilliham
In a great piece of foresight at the ARC, they have also funded an equivalent centre in translational photosynthesis. We plan to collaborate with these researchers. The plan in 7 years is that we can find ways to not only improve energy use efficiency in plants, but we can also identify ways in which we can increase the amount of energy that plants can capture through photosynthesis.
Busy and exciting times!
