Making Green Guard® greener: enhancing the efficacy of a biopesticide. The project aims to identify naturally occurring micro-organisms to increase the effectiveness of Green Guard ®, which is a biopesticide used against the Australian plague locust. The project will use next-generation sequencing and other molecular techniques to potentially identify candidate microbes or combinations of microbes that can be added to Green Guard to enhance locust susceptibility. The project also aims to quantif ....Making Green Guard® greener: enhancing the efficacy of a biopesticide. The project aims to identify naturally occurring micro-organisms to increase the effectiveness of Green Guard ®, which is a biopesticide used against the Australian plague locust. The project will use next-generation sequencing and other molecular techniques to potentially identify candidate microbes or combinations of microbes that can be added to Green Guard to enhance locust susceptibility. The project also aims to quantify the interactive impact of temperature and nutrition on immune function, disease resistance and host-plant quality of plague locusts; and to explore the combined effects of temperature, habitat and Green Guard, in combination with candidate microbes or pathogens, on the behaviour and collective movement of locusts. It is anticipated that this will have implications for management and control strategies.Read moreRead less
Development of a vaccine to protect koalas against koala retrovirus (KoRV). This project aims to develop a vaccine against koala retrovirus (KoRV) to arrest the increasing loss of animals due to this infection. Along with Chlamydia, KoRV threatens the long-term survival of the koala. KoRV infects over 95 per cent of Australia’s koalas and has been strongly linked to lymphoma and leukemia. Although quarantine and antiretroviral drug treatment are possible control measures, they are impractical in ....Development of a vaccine to protect koalas against koala retrovirus (KoRV). This project aims to develop a vaccine against koala retrovirus (KoRV) to arrest the increasing loss of animals due to this infection. Along with Chlamydia, KoRV threatens the long-term survival of the koala. KoRV infects over 95 per cent of Australia’s koalas and has been strongly linked to lymphoma and leukemia. Although quarantine and antiretroviral drug treatment are possible control measures, they are impractical in the wild, leaving vaccination as the only realistic option. This is valuable for both wild and captive koalas; zoos report high animal losses due to KoRV-associated lymphoma. The main outcome will be a KoRV vaccine which can be combined with a Chlamydia vaccine which is being developed in parallel.Read moreRead less