杏吧原创

Fruitful research

IT SOUNDS like a bad joke: what do you do with a golden kiwi? No, it鈥檚 got nothing to do with tanned antipodeans. The golden kiwi is the latest taste sensation, a variety of kiwi fruit bred to have a smooth skin with few bristles, yellow rather than green flesh and a higher vitamin C content. The sweet fruit is just the latest in New Zealand鈥檚 bulging crop of offerings from agricultural biotech.

New Zealand鈥檚 economy is highly dependent on agriculture and horticulture exports, and the country has built up a thriving R&D sector attached to the industry, which is mainly funded by private-sector investment. Over the past year, the government has increased its support for the sector with grants of more than NZ$16 million (拢5.7 million) for public-private partnerships, and has set a revenue target of NZ$1 billion by 2014. Since income from the sector was NZ$811 million for the 2005-2006 financial year, it is a target it expects to reach. As an incentive, last year for the first time, biotechs received tax relief to cover start-up costs.

The country鈥檚 biotech industry is blossoming as a result, with a broad spectrum of mainly agriculturally based research. Other recent variations on the national fruit include kiwiberry, a smooth-skinned miniature kiwi designed to appeal to the convenience food market, and the cocktail kiwi with a smooth edible skin. Like the golden kiwi, these were developed by HortResearch, one of the nation鈥檚 nine Crown Research Institutes (CRIs), and are marketed worldwide by Zespri, an Auckland-based company set up for the purpose, and a growing number of subsidiaries in Asia, Europe and the US.

聯Recent variations on the national fruit include the smooth-skinned kiwiberry and the cocktail kiwi聰

New Zealand is big on ideas. Between 2003 and 2005, 190 biotechnology-related patents were granted to its universities and organisations. It is also a small, relatively poor country, far from venture capital, so to get its ideas off the drawing board it relies on partnerships with larger economies. While the database of fruit genes and fruit compounds at HortResearch is the largest in the world and attracts leading researchers in the field, New Zealand鈥檚 4 million population cannot support product development. This is why it encourages companies in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Another important area of development in the agribiotech sector is in the so-called 鈥渇unctional foods鈥�. In January, a team at the HortResearch CRI showed that anthocyanins, the chemicals that produce the black colour of blackcurrants, might protect against Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. The team are looking at how anthocyanins relate to antioxidant activity and ultimately to health, says Karl Crawford, business leader for food and health at the institute.

New Zealand appears to be uniquely suitable for such research, says Crawford. 鈥淚t may be that the intense natural light in New Zealand in the absence of scattering by air pollution plays a role, together with variety selections suited for local climatic and soil conditions.鈥�

Belching cattle

EIGHTY million cows, sheep and deer burp their way into a major methane headache for New Zealand, which has the unique distinction among developed nations of having methane as its major greenhouse gas.

About 90 per cent of the country鈥檚 methane emissions come from ruminant belches. A typical dairy cow can produce between 200 and 600 litres of methane per day, some 50 to 150 kilograms a year. If burnt, a cow鈥檚 yearly methane emissions would yield around as much energy as 200 litres of gasoline.

In the face of widespread opposition, a so-called 鈥渇latulence tax鈥� for farms has recently been abandoned. Instead, both the government and the agricultural industry are jointly funding research into reducing methane emissions, with the aim of achieving a 5 per cent cut by 2012. The rest of the world is watching eagerly to see exactly what happens here.

A leading light in the research effort is AgResearch, a CRI that is one of the partners in the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium based in Wellington, which was set up in 2002. AgResearch is tackling the problem on a number of fronts. The methane 鈥渂urps鈥� are produced during bacterial fermentation of feed in the animals鈥� main stomach, the rumen, so one approach it has looked into is to create different feeds. AgResearch scientists placed a halter contraption on a cow named Mirtle to collect methane emissions over 24-hour periods while they altered her feed. From this, certain feeds such as forage legumes containing condensed tannins were identified as lowering the emissions.

Other strategies include modifying the bacterial flora of the ruminants, and tracking down animals of the same breed that burp less, in the hope that researchers will be able to isolate genetic markers for breeding low-emission animals.

Sheep methane is also on the agenda. AgResearch scientists are working with the National Institute for Agricultural Research in France to breed sheep that can ingest food and grow normally without producing any methane. This project is a good example of how New Zealand鈥檚 scientists maintain strong links with other institutions globally, despite the country鈥檚 great geographical distance from Europe and the US.

More than a quarter of AgResearch鈥檚 permanent staff come from overseas. One of them is David Pacheco, a senior metabolism and microbial genomics research scientist who is studying the way ruminants metabolise their food.

Originally from Mexico, Pacheco says he was attracted to the institute by the sheer range of its research projects and capabilities. 鈥淎t AgResearch we have people looking for answers about plants, cows, bacteria and parasites,鈥� he says.

Superconductor dreaming

SURPRISINGLY for such a small country, New Zealand leads the world in a technology that other countries have spent nearly a century trying to perfect: high-temperature superconductivity. Much of this work is by Superlink Developments, a commercial offshoot of Industrial Research, one of the country鈥檚 Crown Research Institutes.

Superconductors are materials that lose all their resistance to electric current when cooled, potentially allowing large currents to be carried through very thin wires. The international market for superconductive wire is projected at more than US$20 billion annually by 2020.

The problem is that most materials only become superconducting when they are cooled to temperatures close to -273 掳C, making them useless for all but a few highly specialised applications. However, after 14 years of hard-fought international patent battles, Superlink and its US-based licensee American Superconductor Corporation have won a US patent for Superlink鈥檚 high-temperature superconducting (HTS) wire. This is in addition to the two patents a year its research has generated over the past seven years.

The key to the new HTS metal oxide is that it functions above -196 掳C, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. This means it can be used economically in a range of applications, including powerful yet light electromagnets and low-loss transmission lines. The first use for the wire will be in the propellers of ocean liners, in which it will be used in a compact yet powerful propulsion motor to allow the propeller to both steer and propel the ship. The researchers believe that this will do away with the need for an additional slowing rudder.

The next challenge is to make the wire more ductile so that it can be used for more applications, and to reduce its cost so that it becomes cost-effective to use the technology in magnet-driven medical devices such as full-body tomography.

Terror detection

THE explosive TATP, used by the would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid in December 2001, has long presented a challenge to security authorities because conventional airport screening systems cannot pick it up. Now Syft Technologies, a Christchurch-based spin-off from the University of Canterbury, has developed Voice100, an instrument the size of a free-standing photocopier that can analyse volatile organic compounds in luggage for traces of TATP. The technology, which was originally created to discover the chemical composition of interstellar clouds, is already being used commercially at five Australian ports to detect fumigants in cargo containers.

Ancient monsters

THE first evidence that land-dwelling dinosaurs lived on isolated islands in the south-west Pacific has been discovered on the Chatham Islands, east of New Zealand鈥檚 South Island. Palaeontologist Jeffrey Stilwell of Monash University in Australia found bones there from a 4-tonne meat-eating dinosaur in a 2-kilometre-long deposit that has also yielded teeth and claws.

The discovery also confirms that the Chatham Islands were connected to New Zealand by a finger-like extension of forested land inhabited by Gondwanan dinosaurs. 鈥淭hey were on their own evolutionary path for probably 15 million years since the separation of the Chathams/New Zealand region from Marie Byrd Land on Antarctica some 85 million years ago,鈥� Stilwell says.

Most dinosaur fossils found on the mainland have been of marine reptiles, such as rikisaurs and plesiosaurs, because New Zealand was covered by sea for a large part of dinosaur history.

Visa break for students

IN a bid to attract high-quality international students to help meet the demand for qualified professionals, the government has relaxed visa and work permit requirements for foreign students. Last year it also cut the fees paid by foreign PhD students, so that they pay the same as New Zealanders.

Overseas students can now work in New Zealand for six months after they have finished their degree, and the amount of paid work they can do while studying has been increased from 15 to 20 hours a week. Those taking a course lasting 12 months or more may apply to work full-time over the summer holidays. Foreign students who apply for a job permit for two years after a course also gain additional points towards becoming a resident, providing they have suitable qualifications and meet other criteria such as good spoken English and no criminal record. Work permits are also available for the husbands and wives of students while their partners are studying.