Seminar Topics and Speakers:
Dr Anthony James is a Research Fellow in QUT’s Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy, working in the Banana Biotechnology Program which combines recent advances in banana genomics and molecular breeding to provide real world solutions to the banana industry both domestically and globally. Anthony has a PhD in plant virology and has worked as a plant pathologist for more than 20 years. Recently, the QCAV-4 banana, a groundbreaking development from Dr. James's group, received approval from Food Standards Australia and New Zealand for human consumption and from the Australian Office of the Gene Technology Regulator for commercial planting in Australia. This marks a significant milestone as it is the first genetically modified banana to achieve this status.
Dr. Brendan Kidd is currently Director of the Australasian SynBio Challenge and previously worked at the University of Western Australia as a joint CSIRO Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform Fellow. The talk will focus on recent work towards building genetic circuits in plants and cover future directions for building designer plants for space and sustainable Earth systems. Brendan completed his PhD at CSIRO and the University of Queensland where he studied transcriptional co-regulators necessary for plant development as well as responses to plant diseases and abiotic stress. Brendan is interested in the decisions plants make to balance stress responses to microbial interaction and his research aims to optimize these decisions to improve plant-based production systems.
