The trials by the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) the University of Adelaide and CSIRO were called off after Intergrain, which was in charge of planting, advised that the growing window was getting short.

ACPFG chief executive and University of Adelaide professor Peter Langridge said they were still waiting for approval from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.  It was getting late in the season and the documentation is massive, so we should have started the process earlier, he said.

In the past, with trials in South Australia and ACT, we'd been able to sow into July, but in WA it was not going to work.

Wheat and barley had been engineered to improve drought tolerance and nitrogen use efficiency and the barley had a modified beta-glucan quality.  The trials would have been on an area of about 10m x 10m each, with plans to assess the cultivars' drought and salinity tolerance.  Professor Langridge said their SA and Canberra trials would still go ahead.

Ultimately, the breeders want to see much more extensive data on performance, so we really need to have trials in WA, he said.  We work on environmental stress tolerance, so WA is perfect because it has just about every problem available to agriculture.  And now you have a government supportive of technology development, and strong support from WA growers it's an attractive place to do some evaluation.

Both CSIRO and ACPFG intend to restart the trials in WA next year.

Intergrain spokewoman Tress Walmsley said they were very supportive of working with the groups collaboratively next year on the projects.  It was getting too late in the season, so we decided not to go ahead with the plantings, she said.

Professor Langridge said they were interested in Corrigin mainly for salinity evaluation.

Drought can be simulated with using rain shelters, but it's hard to simulate salinity farmers wouldn't be too happy if we dumped salt on their paddock, he said. 

Professor Langridge said they were also interested in trialling GM wheat and barley cultivars with boron tolerance in the near future.

Ideally we'd like to look at a combination of boron and salt, because they go well together, he said.  

Source: Wire News Services