Adding colour to botany research
Purple and lilac carnations have been selling well for ten years now but innovators are forever restless. Blue is the Mount Everest for genetic floral engineering and those red pigments are still getting in the way of the ideal.
Dr Tony Gendall, a plant biologist at La Trobe, has won an ARC Linkage Grant to improve on nature’s palette by creating a blue carnation. The project involves both fundamental and applied research into the way genes control pigments in petals.
The grant of $100,000 over three years is funding the work of PhD student Sonia Firorito in the Botany Department and in the laboratories of Australian bio-tech company Florigene.
Dr Gendall says that floral pigments are complex, perhaps more than Florigene first anticipated when the company first started up in 1982 with the dream of creating a blue rose.
Pigments known as anthocyanins control for red, orange, purple and blue in carnations. They are similar but of different chemical structure. ‘Basically we want to stop red being made,’ Dr Gendall says.
Five years ago a group in Japan used proteins to alter the colour of morning glory. These proteins were similar to ones being studied by Dr Gendall in Arabidopsis which control the level of acidity in cells.
The discovery led Dr Gendall to hypothesise that it was the pH in carnations that prevented them from turning blue. ‘We hope to identify proteins in carnations that affect the balance of pH in the cells,’ he says. ‘Some of these proteins might be useful for modifying colours.’
The La Trobe group is taking a different tack to the one Florigene took in the creation of its Moondust and Moonshadow carnations.
The company introduced pigments into white flowers while the La Trobe researchers are testing a range of genes that affect colour.
‘We are introducing them into flowers directly and quickly through transient assays,’ Dr Gendall says. ‘Our lab has a basic understanding of how to address the function of proteins, change their expression and test them rapidly.’ He finds the industry research stimulating.
‘It’s a matter of try it and test the results. You take a young flower – red or purple – introduce genes or turn some off. You look at the way the plant grows flowers in vitro to see if the colour tends more towards blue. It depends on what you are putting in. If there is any change in colour that gene or protein is important.’
A lot of the basic physiology of carnations is not understood, he says, but the company sees the benefit of expanding the knowledge base.
‘As an academic you have less and less of that kind of luxury. Funding is now based more on the national benefit for the economy than questions of fundamental research. Linkage grants make that obvious.’
Australian bio-tech company Florigene is based in La Trobe’s R&D Park. It is one of Australia’s oldest R&D companies and leads the world in genetically-engineered flowers.
Florigene research director John Mason is co-supervising the PhD student and the results of her research will become the property of the company through a licensing agreement with the University.