A genomic approach to the mechanism of meiotic recombination in Neurospora. Recombination shuffles DNA sequences between homologous chromosomes during the reduction division in the life cycle of higher organisms. Along with mutation, it is a key process in evolution. Understanding of the molecular processes involved in recombination is largely based on yeast, which is intolerant of significant levels of sequence mismatch, limiting the resolution of analyses of normal recombination events. We hav ....A genomic approach to the mechanism of meiotic recombination in Neurospora. Recombination shuffles DNA sequences between homologous chromosomes during the reduction division in the life cycle of higher organisms. Along with mutation, it is a key process in evolution. Understanding of the molecular processes involved in recombination is largely based on yeast, which is intolerant of significant levels of sequence mismatch, limiting the resolution of analyses of normal recombination events. We have shown that Neurospora, like other less tractable multicellular eukaryotes, is tolerant of sequence mismatch, allowing high resolution analysis of individual recombination events. This project will build on fundamental advances we have already made in understanding how recombination occurs.Read moreRead less
Defining New Building Blocks for the Construction of Artificial Genetic Circuits. By characterising the components of a natural genetic switch, we will make available a set of well defined genetic building blocks for construction of rationally designed biological circuits. The ability to build such circuits would have significant economic benefit in areas such as metabolic engineering, to improve the efficiency of production of natural compounds from micro-organisms, and in biomedicine, for the ....Defining New Building Blocks for the Construction of Artificial Genetic Circuits. By characterising the components of a natural genetic switch, we will make available a set of well defined genetic building blocks for construction of rationally designed biological circuits. The ability to build such circuits would have significant economic benefit in areas such as metabolic engineering, to improve the efficiency of production of natural compounds from micro-organisms, and in biomedicine, for the controlled release of therapeutic compounds. The involvement of Honours and Ph.D students in this project will expose the next generation of Australian scientists to this emerging discipline. International collaboration leading to publications in high impact scientific journals will enhance Australia's scientific reputation.Read moreRead less
IMPROVING NITROGEN USE EFFICIENCY IN CROP PLANTS: ROLE OF THE AMMONIUM TRANSPORT FAMILY AMT. Improving nitrogen use efficiency in crop plants will reduce the use of environmentally damaging nitrogen fertilisers that threaten through leaching the sustainability of Australia's agricultural sector and local water ecosystems. Plants contain genes that encode transport proteins required for the uptake of nitrogen (ammonium and nitrate) from the soil. We will identify the in planta activity of the A ....IMPROVING NITROGEN USE EFFICIENCY IN CROP PLANTS: ROLE OF THE AMMONIUM TRANSPORT FAMILY AMT. Improving nitrogen use efficiency in crop plants will reduce the use of environmentally damaging nitrogen fertilisers that threaten through leaching the sustainability of Australia's agricultural sector and local water ecosystems. Plants contain genes that encode transport proteins required for the uptake of nitrogen (ammonium and nitrate) from the soil. We will identify the in planta activity of the AMT family of ammonium transporters and associated signalling pathways which control the uptake and assimilation of ammonium in plants. This project will confirm the mechanisms involved in ammonium uptake from the soil and lead to the development of ammonium-nitrogen efficient crop plants.Read moreRead less
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE0561231
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$671,715.00
Summary
MRI GRID Computing Facility: Design, Optimisation and Image Processing. The MRI Grid Computing Facility provides the IT infrastructure to achieve effective e-research in the area of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, a field of neuroscience research that revolutionizes the way brain diseases are identified and treated. The facility consists of a dedicated high performance grid compute engine, distributed visualisation workstations, and distributed data warehouse facilities. Software tools acc ....MRI GRID Computing Facility: Design, Optimisation and Image Processing. The MRI Grid Computing Facility provides the IT infrastructure to achieve effective e-research in the area of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, a field of neuroscience research that revolutionizes the way brain diseases are identified and treated. The facility consists of a dedicated high performance grid compute engine, distributed visualisation workstations, and distributed data warehouse facilities. Software tools accessible through the Internet will enable researchers to archive, retrieve and exchange data and software; access distributed MR image databases and the latest MR image analysis tools; schedule analysis tasks on the grid compute engine, the outcomes of which will be visualized by the visualization workstations.Read moreRead less
Enzymatic synthesis, microencapsulation and biological evaluation of a new class of omega-3 derived functional food ingredients. Inflammatory mediated diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and Alzheimer's disease are major causes of death in Australia. Rates of these diseases are rising over time, partly due to poor diet including low consumption levels of healthy omega-3 fatty acids from fish. This project aims to develop healthy food ingredients from natu ....Enzymatic synthesis, microencapsulation and biological evaluation of a new class of omega-3 derived functional food ingredients. Inflammatory mediated diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and Alzheimer's disease are major causes of death in Australia. Rates of these diseases are rising over time, partly due to poor diet including low consumption levels of healthy omega-3 fatty acids from fish. This project aims to develop healthy food ingredients from naturally occurring omega-3 fatty acid derivatives that are more stable to oxidation and more biologically active than fish derived omega-3 fatty acids. The development of these omega-3 derivatives as functional food ingredients could provide an additional strategy for helping to prevent the rapid increase in inflammatory mediated diseases in the Australian population.Read moreRead less
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE100100235
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$280,000.00
Summary
Accelerating Australia's large scale video surveillance research programmes. The research to be conducted using this infrastructure will bring immense benefits to Australia in terms of increased levels of public safety and in the protection of critical facilities from terrorism and other crimes, by developing better surveillance systems. This will provide both increases in measurable research outputs and opportunities for Australian business to commercialise these systems. The infrastructure wil ....Accelerating Australia's large scale video surveillance research programmes. The research to be conducted using this infrastructure will bring immense benefits to Australia in terms of increased levels of public safety and in the protection of critical facilities from terrorism and other crimes, by developing better surveillance systems. This will provide both increases in measurable research outputs and opportunities for Australian business to commercialise these systems. The infrastructure will accelerate the pace of surveillance research and development in Australia, enhancing the competitiveness of both Australia's researchers and the businesses that will commercialise these researchers' discoveries.Read moreRead less
Tracking targets in large scale surveillance camera networks. The research is expected to provide a significant boost in the effectiveness of safety and security measures for public facilities and open spaces that are monitored by surveillance cameras. The general public benefits from this through a decreased need for intrusive security measures, and increased deterrence of crime and anti-social behaviour. This capability is in demand worldwide for both public and private camera networks, whose ....Tracking targets in large scale surveillance camera networks. The research is expected to provide a significant boost in the effectiveness of safety and security measures for public facilities and open spaces that are monitored by surveillance cameras. The general public benefits from this through a decreased need for intrusive security measures, and increased deterrence of crime and anti-social behaviour. This capability is in demand worldwide for both public and private camera networks, whose usefulness is currently limited by the difficulty of monitoring them. We therefore anticipate considerable commercial interest in Australia and internationally.
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Exploiting novel yeast attributes to produce industrial strains with better fermentative and processing qualities. Food and beverage fermentations are problematic processes, largely due to limitations of the yeast being used. This laboratory has indentified in individual yeast strains highly desirable fermentative characteristics or else the ability to over-produce compounds that benefit product processing. Pursuing the commercial potential of these findings is the specific objective of this pro ....Exploiting novel yeast attributes to produce industrial strains with better fermentative and processing qualities. Food and beverage fermentations are problematic processes, largely due to limitations of the yeast being used. This laboratory has indentified in individual yeast strains highly desirable fermentative characteristics or else the ability to over-produce compounds that benefit product processing. Pursuing the commercial potential of these findings is the specific objective of this proposal. Thus we will extend our collaboration with Coopers Brewery through this new project area with the aims of a) producing optimised, hybrid (non-GMO) strains with combinations of desirable fermentation properties, b) develop novel processing or quality-enhancing treatments while c) generating a high caliber PhD graduate with extensive industry experience.Read moreRead less
Image search for simulator content creation. The World Wide Web contains tens of billions of images, with personal and industrial collections stretching to may times that number. The potential economic value of these image-based resources is enormous, but largely untapped as we have no practical way of recovering the images we need. This project will develop image search technologies which will allow Australian industry to exploit these important resources. Some of the wide variety of possible ....Image search for simulator content creation. The World Wide Web contains tens of billions of images, with personal and industrial collections stretching to may times that number. The potential economic value of these image-based resources is enormous, but largely untapped as we have no practical way of recovering the images we need. This project will develop image search technologies which will allow Australian industry to exploit these important resources. Some of the wide variety of possible applications might include the searching of surveillance video for objects of interest, vision-based guidance of unmanned vehicles, smart-phone and smart-home systems which understand their environments, and stock tracking systems which can detect spoilage.Read moreRead less
Deep visual understanding: learning to see in an unruly world. Deep Learning has achieved incredible success at an astonishing variety of Computer Vision tasks recently. This project aims to convey this success into the challenging domain of high-level image-based reasoning. It will extend deep learning to achieve flexible semantic reasoning about the content of images based on information gleaned from the huge volumes of data available on the Internet. The project expects to overcome one of the ....Deep visual understanding: learning to see in an unruly world. Deep Learning has achieved incredible success at an astonishing variety of Computer Vision tasks recently. This project aims to convey this success into the challenging domain of high-level image-based reasoning. It will extend deep learning to achieve flexible semantic reasoning about the content of images based on information gleaned from the huge volumes of data available on the Internet. The project expects to overcome one of the primary limitations of deep learning and will greatly increase its practical application to a range of industrial, cultural or health settings.Read moreRead less