Prospects for Improving photosynthesis in food and fibre crops to mitigate future climates

Date

Tuesday 22 August 2017

Time

12:30-13:30 (AEST – Canberra Brisbane Armidale Werribee); 12:00 (ACST – Adelaide); 10:30 (AWST – Perth)

Venues

CSIRO: Black Mountain – Discovery Theatre; Adelaide Waite – B101-FG-SmallWICWest; Brisbane QBP – Level 3 South telepresence room (3.323); Armidale – B55-FG-R00-Small; Perth Floreat – B1b Boardroom; Werribee (Melbourne) – Peacock Room

Speaker

Dr Robert Sharwood (Research Fellow) ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, The Australian National University.

Synopsis

With significant increases in the global population and the accelerating changes in climate, maintaining future increases in yield potential of food and fibre crops is coming under serious threat. The impact of climate change will intensify with the continued reductions in arable land and the availability of water that is often limiting for crop production. Future climates are predicted to increase the intensity and frequency of extreme events, such as heatwaves and varying rainfall patterns associated with droughts. Crops will now need to be equipped with flexible strategies to cope with these extreme climates to mitigate declines in productive yields associated with climate variability. My talk will focus on current efforts to improve photosynthesis under future climates through engineering changes to CO₂ fixation guided by screens of natural diversity of plants originating from different climates of origin and evolutionary lineages.

Biography

Dr Sharwood completed his PhD in 2006 at ANU. His research focused on engineering foreign Rubisco into tobacco to improve CO2 fixation and developing new transgenic tools to aid engineering Rubisco. He then moved to the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University to further understand how chloroplast gene expression was regulated to improve bioengineering of foreign genes in the chloroplast. In 2011 he returned to the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment where he focused on studying the natural diversity of Rubisco and C4 photosynthetic pathways to generate new solutions to improve photosynthesis in key crops. In 2013 he was awarded an ARC DECRA to study chloroplast gene regulation in land plants and subsequently Awarded a Science and innovation award from the Department of Agriculture to investigate the photosynthetic underpinning of water use efficiency and thermotolerance within cotton. Since completing his DECRA he has focused more in translational research by continuing to investigate cotton and related species for yield traits in CO2 fixation and Eucalyptus to find genotypes that can withstand future hotter and drier climates within the Murray-Darling basin.

This is a public seminar.

No visitor pass is required for non-CSIRO attendees attending via Discovery Lecture Theatre