PlantBio analysed South Africa’s needs and identified the following thematic areas which are used to evaluate proposals.
- Poverty Alleviation and Food Security
- Biofuels and Industrial crops
- Exploitation of South African Bio-resources
- Environmentally Friendly Agriculture
- Technology Platforms
- Proteomics and Genomics
- Biosafety
- In vitro Propagation
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Poverty alleviation and food security focuses on the needs of small-scale farmers. PlantBio has identified the following areas that could be used to address small-scale farmers' needs:
- Biofertilisation.
- Breeding as a means to improve varieties and make them more suitable to local soil and climatic conditions and/or market demands.
- Plant transformation and breeding as a means to control and address diseases and abiotic stress.
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Biofuels are renewable liquid fuels manufactured from dry organic matter or combustible oils produced in plants, rather than fossil fuels. The biofuels as we know them today are either ethanol or biodiesel. Our dependance on imported fossil fuels would be greatly reduced if South Africa is able to produce sufficient biofuels. Biofuels are viewed as a sustainable and viable source of energy, the use of which would reduce air toxics emissions as well as the build up of greenouse gases into the atmosphere.
PlantBio has adopted Biofuels as a strategic thematic area and aims to identify the most suitable energy crops for the commercial production of biofuels in Southern Africa.
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For many centuries bio-resources have been shared amongst people as they exchanged seeds, plants and animals. The agricultural diversity within South Africa is an integral part of the culture of our people, and as part of the developing world we need to protect this heritage. Africa’s biological diversity is at risk as many plants and crop species come under threat of extinction. One way in which to secure value from our bio-resources is through legal claim to the intellectual property rights.
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This is the use of natural systems or process to produce crops, thereby reducing the dependence on chemical agents. Environmentally friendly agriculture assists in protecting our environment and natural resources. Included in these are the use of biocontrol agents and biofertilisation.
Biocontrol is the use of microbes, predatory insects or microbes-derived toxins/ pheromones to combat plant diseases. Applications are either preventative or made once the casual agent has been detected on the crop. Treatments are directed against viruses, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, insects and weeds. Current use of agrochemicals to control plant disease amounts to US$25B (2003) with a negative Current Annual Growth Rate.
Biofertilisation is the improvement of soil fertility using living or modified organisms. The most commonly used microbes are Rhizobium spp (fixes nitrogen from air through nodules in the roots of legumes, thereby enhancing host plant growth) and mycorrhizal fungi (which are applied to roots to enhance phosphate from the soil) as soil fertility is a severe challenge in Africa.
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PlantBio's activities will rely on a set of Platform Technologies that will provide multifunctional capabilities and inputs into one or more biotechnology activity areas. The output enables the progression of a project by addressing bottlenecks, mission critical steps in the value chain of R&D. Though rendered as a service and a product and therefore marketable, platform technologies are subsidiary to the ultimate downstream biotechnology product, which carries a higher value. In assessing what platform technologies relate to the strategic focus areas, the following will be considered:
- What are the main platform technologies, sub-components and relevance to strategic focus areas?
- How dependent will the focus area be; what is already available and what is the cost of filling the gap?
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Genomics is defined as the discipline of mapping, sequencing and analyzing genomes; it encompasses structural and functional genomics. Structural genomics focuses on the determination of the structure and ultimately the sequence of whole genomes. Functional genomics is the development and application of global (genome-wide or system-wide) experimental approaches to assess gene function by making use of the information provided by structural genomics and by high-throughput or large-scale experimental methodologies combined with statistical and computational analysis of the results. Functional genomics enables the efficient mining of the data sets for particularly valuable information, narrowing the gap between sequence and function and yielding new insights into the behaviour of biological systems for fundamental and commercial purposes. It provides the tools with which to effectively exploit South Africa's competitive advantage in biological resources as a genomics-based approach to mining of genetic diversity increases efficiency by more than 10,000-fold.
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Biosafety deals with all safety aspects relating to the application of biotechnologies from the transfer, handling and use of any living modified organism resulting from biotechnology. Biosafety will also cover the release into the environment of transgenic plants and other organisms, in particular micoorganisms which could negatively affect plant genetic resources, animal or human health, or cause environmental or economic damage.
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In vitro propagation is the propagation of plants through non-germination i.e. through cloning. Meristemmatic material is cut, sterilized, cultured, divided and transplanted repeatedly. Once several cultures are grown, they are transferred to root development media and then to soil where they are transferred to green houses for hardening off before being planted into the ground.
Propagation is currently used in the following industries: forestry, wine, citrus and subtropical fruit and ornamental pants. In vitro propagation is core to the banana plant market, which is one of the major revenue generators for countries importing fruit to the EU and US.
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