Plant development offers wool hope

Press, 14 January 1986, Page 7

Plant development offers wool hope

NZPA staff correspondent Sydney

Biologists in < Canberra have developed Australia’s first genetically engineered plant in an advance that could eventually lead to a huge boost in the nation’s wool clip.

A research group in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Office, Australia’s equivalent of the D.5.1.R., has successfully transferred a gene for a high-sulphur protein from pea seeds to a tobacco plant. The significance of that unlikely sounding breakthrough is that sulphur is a major factor in wool growth in sheep, and the scientists believe that if they can work the cloning on lucerne they will have found the key to increasing the sulphur intake of sheep naturally. According to the “Can-

berra Times,” the advance will lead to a protein-en-hanced lucerne which could increase sheep wool growth up to 30 per cent The C.5.1.R.0. team hopes to have transferred the gene to lucerne within 12 months and to have created a highsulphur version of one of agriculture’s most important fodder crops.

Scientists in Australia have already shown that sheep which have a diet supplemented by sulphur, using special devices which deliver synthetic amino acids directly into the sheep’s true stomach, can grow up to 30 per cent more wool — the challenge has been to find a way of doing it naturally through diet. The problem has been that sulphur is normally broken down in the sheep’s specialised stomach, the rumen, before it can get to the

main stomach and so enhance wool growth.

What the scientists have done is isolate a sulphur protein from the pea which can survive the bacteria of the rumen. Dr Jim Peacock, director of the C.5.1.R.0.’s plant industry division, said that the project began two years ago and promised to overcome one of the most difficult problems in animal nutrition.

“It has not often been possible for animal scientists to define what an animal needs in its diet to become more productive,” he said. “It is even more difficult for a plant breeder to change the nutritional properties of a plant in a specific direction to fit the animal producer’s needs. “We are well on the way to achieving both.”