ANU researchers win Australian Academy of Science funding
Three researchers from The Australian National University have recently won prestigious funding grants from the Australian Academy of Science.
Dr Rob Sharwood from the Research School of Biology was awarded the Thomas Davies Research Grant to undertake new research to help improve carbon dioxide capture in plants.
“We want to improve plant productivity in a simpler way,” explains Dr Sharwood.
With climate change and population pressures set to impact the amount of food available in the future, the end goal for Dr Sharwood is to “redesign plants that are fit for future environments”.
But to do this he is not searching for genes within crop plants themselves. Instead he is looking at genes from microscopic bacteria that exist deep in the ocean water column, called cyanobacteria.
The project will involve synthesizing the genes coding for the photosynthetic enzyme Rubisco (ribulose 1,5 bisphosphate carboxylase / oxygenase), to investigate how effective they are at using carbon dioxide that is ultimately responsible for producing the building blocks of simple sugars.
If they find anything of interest, this could help scientists at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis to develop new ways to improve the efficiency of the most abundant protein on Earth.
“Ultimately what we want to do is take the cyanobacterial genes and put them into key crops such as wheat and rice, so we can improve their CO2 fixation capacity and ultimately their productive yields,” says Dr Sharwood.
Ms Donna Jean Belder, a PhD student at the Fenner School of Environment & Society, was also successful in the funding round, winning a grant from The Margaret Middleton Fund for endangered Australian native vertebrate animals.
This fund offers annual science grants to support field-based, high-quality ecological research.
Dr Sean Hodgman, from the Atomic and Molecular Physics Laboratories at the Research School of Physics and Engineering was the third successful ANU researcher, winning the J G Russell Award which supports talented younger researchers.
More details on the funding announcement are available on the Australian Academy of Science Website.
