When research meets opportunity

Cauliflowers. That’s the crop Professor John Randles focused on as an Honours student in agricultural science at the University of Adelaide’s Waite campus. 

It was the 1960s and methods for studying plant viruses were in their infancy, but Randles wanted to investigate plant disease. The researcher’s data collection methods were also low-tech at this time. You could call it a walk in the park. 

“Every two weeks, I’d put my gumboots on and stomp about in the Hills, counting the number of cauliflower plants affected by a particular virus,” Randles says. From these simple beginnings, Randles and his colleagues slowly built capability in plant virology. “We developed methods for purifying plant viruses, for pulling them apart, for visualising and identifying them in a whole range of crops,” he says. 

The project was the beginning of a more than five-decade career on plant disease – one which would have far broader influence than the health of cauliflowers in the Adelaide Hills. 

In the early 1970s, John was sent to the Philippines as a consultant with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations to investigate cadang-cadang – a disease killing coconut palms. Cadang-cadang had killed 40 million coconut palms in the Philippines and caused US$4 billion in economic losses. Thankfully, John had the right toolkit to be of assistance. 

“With a virus hypothesis in mind, we applied all the techniques we had previously developed,” John says. “This allowed us to identify it wasn’t actually a virus, but rather an entity known as a viroid that was responsible.” 

Viroids are smaller than viruses and made of RNA. John was the first to show these tiny culprits were the causal agent of cadang-cadang. It was an exciting moment of discovery built on a decade of exploratory research. The applications of the knowledge were global. 

“We subsequently found viroids in coconut palms in Guam, and in another economically important crop in the Oceania region – palm oil,” John says. “It’s been a fascinating adventure, all stemming from an ‘a-ha’ moment in 1974.” 

Like the generations of researchers who came before them, current Waite academics are pursuing their own ‘a-ha’ moments. This has often occurred through the freedom of enquiry known as blue-sky research, but one Waite-based program is extending its focus beyond even that seemingly limitless boundary. 

Backed by $35 million in federal government funding, an additional $15 million cash and $40 million of in-kind support from academic, government and industry partners, the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S) has a bold mission. 

P4S will conduct research to provide the next generation of space explorers with nutritious foods, and on-demand supply of materials and medicines to enable long-term space habitation. It officially started operations in early 2024 and will run to at least 2031. 

Centre Director for P4S, Professor Matthew Gilliham, explains that while space habitation is one focal point, research taking place within P4S programs needs to produce terrestrial outcomes.

“Yes, long-term space habitation is on the horizon; but it’s also really important our research delivers here on Earth,” Matthew says. “Working through the lens of space leads to new and unexpected opportunities to improve sustainability on this planet, especially aligned to bio-manufacturing and controlled-environment agriculture.” 

With 30 partners from around the world, including the Australian Space Agency, P4S is an Australian contributor to NASA’s Artemis mission. Artemis plans to put the first woman and person of colour on the moon by 2030, and to develop the technologies required for humans to venture to Mars and return to Earth in the 2040s.

“We’re going to need plants that grow efficiently in new environments, that are highly nutritious, and that are useful in terms of producing medicines and materials on demand,” says Matthew. “And these will be just as applicable on Earth as they are for space.”

Associate Professor Jenny Mortimer contributes to P4S as University of Adelaide node leader, and with her expertise in Plant Synthetic Biology. She says plants are essentially living factories.

“Plants manufacture a huge array of different chemicals,” Jenny says. “They take carbon dioxide, sunlight and water, plus a handful of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphate, and make products that are useful to humans – wood, foods and medicines, just to name a few.”

Jenny says humans have been using breeding techniques to create plants with useful characteristics for thousands of years.

“Our current research is just a continuation of that history, but with new techniques to make it happen even more quickly – which is vital in the face of climate change, and to meet new purposes such as space travel,” she says.

Zero-waste plants optimised for controlled environments – in other words, high-yield plants that are useful in their entirety and can be grown inside – is a core area of focus for P4S.

“Plants that are grown indoors don’t have to deal with all the challenges that come with being outside,” Jenny says. “And so they can just get on with producing what you want them to produce, whether that’s a particular molecule that’s useful as a drug, or plant proteins for food.”

Commonly found growing on the surface of lakes and other bodies of still water, Jenny says duckweed already has features that make it suitable as a key candidate plant for space.

“Duckweed doesn’t waste resources making a root system, and the entire plant is edible,” she says. “Technology for growing plants in vertical indoor systems has improved so much, it’s now becoming viable to grow large amounts of plants like duckweed.”

Mortimer’s research programs are investigating protein content in duckweed, as well as its potential to produce bioplastics and molecules that offer health benefits, such as pharmaceuticals. She is confident any promising research findings from her labs can be translated for use on Earth and in space.

“There are very few places in the world, other than this Waite campus, where very fundamental research into how plants work at a molecular level is so well connected with other aspects of agriculture,” Jenny says. “Here, we work with plant breeders, and we’re co-located with CSIRO and the South Australian Research and Development Institute, so the links with application are always there.”

Although Peter Waite was not a scientist, he recognised the importance of experimentation and innovation in advancing agricultural practice and economic development in South Australia. “It behoves us to call science to our aid to a greater extent than hitherto has been done, otherwise we cannot hope to keep in the forefront,” he wrote in 1913, explaining his land gift to the University of Adelaide.

Whether tackling plant disease, a changing climate or space travel, blue-sky research continues Waite’s vision of applying science to answer life’s biggest challenges. 

Written by Sarah Keenihan

Photography by Jack Fenby