A FOOD oil mill near Mazyr in Belarus by the River Pripyat is being
converted to process rapeseed into industrial lubricants. The project highlights
the problems of farmers living in the shadow of Chernobyl: no one wants to buy
their produce even if it is shown to be safe.

The Mazyr mill was built to turn oilseeds into margarine and cooking oils.
Today it runs at a fraction of its capacity and can sell its oils only to the
varnish industry. Under the aegis of the Austrian Biofuels Institute (ABI) the
mill is being converted to make greases for motor vehicles and lubricating oils
for anything from tractors and hydraulic lifts to chainsaws and lawnmowers.

The conversion is part of a larger project run by the joint division of the
UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency
to monitor soil for two radioactive contaminants from the Chernobyl disaster,
caesium-137 and strontium-90. Already the scheme has identified areas where
contamination is low enough to allow farmers to grow rape, the ideal oilseed for
industrial use.

Meanwhile, the ABI, under contract to the joint division, has begun work to
step up energy efficiency at the mill and improve the quality of its oils. “We
want local people to do as much as possible and import as little machinery as
possible,” says Werner Koerbitz of ABI. The aim is to start with the simplest
products, such as greases, and move on later to more sophisticated products such
as biodiesel. Studies are also under way to find new markets—chainsaw oil
for the forestry industry for example—which the mill could supply almost
immediately without spending too much on new equipment.

Margit Laimer and her team, from the Institute of Applied Microbiology
at the Agriculture and Forestry University in Vienna, targeted Sharka
disease, which is caused by the plum pox virus (PPV), the most damaging
pathogen of stone-fruit trees. Among the most commercially valuable victims
of the pox are species of Prunus – apricots, peaches and plums. The disease
deforms the fruit and makes them ripen unevenly. Sharka is widespread in
eastern Europe and Mediterranean countries. In Greece, for example, some
80 per cent of peach plantations were infected by the late 1980s. Some of
Austria’s varieties are close to being wiped out by the disease, says Laimer.

The virus is carried by aphids. ‘There is no cure and an infected tree
is of no use within two to three years, so it should really be cut down
as soon as the symptoms are detected,’ says Artur da Camara Machado,
Laimer’s fellow researcher. Laimer says the US has very strict quarantine
regulations on all Prunus material, and PPV is the only plant pathogen for
which it has an emergency plan in case it crosses the Atlantic.

Laimer’s team worked with cells from the apricot, Prunus armeniaca.
Into these they added one of the genes that codes for the virus’s protein
coat. Earlier work with herbaceous plants showed that this gene provides
resistance to the virus, rather like a vaccine, although the mechanism is
still not properly understood.

To transfer the protein coat gene, Laimer and colleagues used the
bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which naturally infects plant cells.
They spliced the gene into a circular piece of DNA, or plasmid, within the
bacterium. Only this DNA is integrated into the plant genome, says Laimer.

She believes that genetic engineering to protect woody species against
a range of infections will soon be commonplace. ‘A virus-free plant is also
more fit to resist other pathogens. This means a considerable reduction
in agrochemicals,’ she says.

While many herbaceous crop species such as alfalfa, potato, tobacco
and tomato have had ‘foreign’ genes introduced into them, work on woody
plants has not gone beyond testing the feasibility of methods for transferring
genes into cells.

Details of the team’s research will be published this month in Plant
Cell Reports. But the team’s work goes on. A large number of seedlings,
10 to 15 centimetres tall, are growing in pots in the hothouse. ‘We know
they carry the resistance gene,’ says Camara Machado. ‘In due course we
will infect them and monitor how the virus behaves.’

The agreement follows the recent success by researchers at the Joint
European Torus (JET) at Culham, Oxfordshire (This Week, 16 November), and
commits the partners to set up a central team of 200 researchers.

The engineering work is expected to start early next year at Garching
in Germany, San Diego, California and Naka in Japan. The four partners have
pledged ÂŁ75 million each over six years. The cost of the entire project
is expected to be ÂŁ5 billion.

The agreement secures the short-term future of the fusion project at
a time when the US has aired doubts about continuing to participate in future
years and the Soviet Union is running out of money to pay its share. France
has also blocked the release of further funds from the Commission.

The design of ITER was approved in late 1990 after three years of joint
work at Garching. ITER will build on the experience gained at JET; it will
be similar in layout but twice the size. The Moscow meeting appointed Paul
Rebut, the director of JET, to head ITER.

ITER must prove that fusion creates more energy than is needed to drive
it. For fuel, it will rely on deuterium and tritium nuclei, a mixture first
used this month in JET.

A key challenge for the engineers is building the ‘diverters’, devices
to remove impurities that cool and quench the plasma. Another innovation
will be the ‘blanket’ modules that will convert energy, from neutrons generated
in the plasma, into heat to produce electricity.

The pioneering experiment at JET helped the Moscow negotiations, says
Henry Seligman, former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and an architect of the programme. ‘Culham certainly helped, but
fusion experts already knew fusion would work, so they had no problem convincing
their governments to put up the money. Even the Soviets came in without
a murmur,’ he says.