CHAGA off to a great start

THE Centre for High-throughput Agricultural Genetic Analysis (CHAGA) has just released its first Annual Report which, says CHAGA Director Professor Keith Gregg, shows a pleasing level of growth and development for such a young research centre.

CHAGA is a joint venture of Murdoch, Curtin, Department of Agriculture WA, and Saturn Biotech Ltd, and is located within the State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre at Murdoch University.

CHAGA is dedicated to research and development of analytical and processing methods with the purpose of making highthroughput genetic analysis available and affordable to agriculture. Genetic analysis services will be provided by commercial partners to CHAGA, using the methods and protocols developed in the new Centre, which willallow services to be provided at affordable rates.

Saturn Biotech is already providing analytical services to agricultural industries and a major role of CHAGA is to supply new testing procedures that will widen the services offered by Saturn.

Within eight months of its beginning, the Centre had already filed its first provisional patent, on a sample-collection device invented by instrumentation Program Manager Dr David Berryman.

This device provides a solution to one of the major time-consuming and labour intensive processes in the analysis chain: the job of getting small samples of plant material into the 96-well plates that are used for robotic processing.

Once the samples are collected, to minimise labour costs it must be practical to extract material for genetic analysis using laboratory robots.

CHAGA research scientists Marie Scobie and Dr Kylie Munyard have developed high-speed, low labour-intensive methods for grain variety identification and automated DNA extraction from plants, animals, and bacteria.

“A great deal of effort is now going into formalising IP agreements, so that some of these methods can be marketed to the biotechnology research world,” said Professor Gregg.

The commercialisation of novel inventions, materials and methods is the central goal of Professor Gregg, who sees this as the most certain way for the Centre to achieve its goal of financial self-suffiency within the very tight three-year schedule.

In addition to industry and government competitive grants, this is expected to provide funding for growth and expansion of the Centre.