A gifted Honours student has been given a boost through a unique grants program to build on his passion for plants and help provide answers for long-term sustainable farming.
The AW Howard Memorial Trust, which fosters and supports pasture research throughout Australia, recently awarded a suite of scholarships, grants and awards including to Murdoch University Molecular Biology student Marshall Tye.
Mr Tye said he was honoured to receive the scholarship for his project, Regulation of symbiotic nitrogen fixation in Mesorhizobium ciceri.
“Essentially, access to nitrogen limits agricultural productivity in Australia. Farmers can add nitrogen to their soil by growing legumes, because these plants form a special symbiotic association with a group of soil bacteria called rhizobia,” he said.
“The plants provide a food source to the bacteria and in exchange, the bacteria convert or fix nitrogen from the air into a form that plants can use.
“The problem is that sometimes the legumes form a symbiosis with rhizobia that are poor nitrogen fixers.
"This means farmers miss out on the full benefits of using legumes in their fields. We don’t know why some rhizobia are suboptimally efficient.”
Mr Tye plans to investigate why this happens by examining how rhizobia fix nitrogen in legumes.
The project builds on existing work in the Legume Rhizobium Sciences group at Murdoch University, which was conducted by Honours alumni Alireza Amiri (Regulation of nitrogen fixation in rhizobia-legume symbioses) and also supported by the AW Howard Honours-Masters scholarship.
Mr Tye's research project will target a suite of genes found commonly among rhizobia species, which potentially act as on switches, to determine whether the genes act alone or synergistically with others to control nitrogen fixation and to establish what each gene’s function is in certain strains of rhizobia.
The AW Howard scholarship is worth a total of $8,000, which is made up of a stipend ($5,000) and project costs ($3,000).
Mr Tye says he plans to use the stipend to purchase a new laptop, which is capable of running the bioinformatic software needed throughout his Honours project.
“I also plan to use the project costs to purchase lab equipment and glasshouse materials and, if permitting, to attend the Australian Nitrogen Fixation conference in December this year,” he said.
“I am interested in researching nitrogen fixation by rhizobia in legume symbiosis because I have had strong passions for sustainability in both the agriculture and horticulture industries that grew from my studies in horticulture and continued to grow considerably throughout my undergraduate studies.
“By conducting this project, I hope to gain the skills required to successfully carry out well designed laboratory-based research in the fields of molecular biology, microbiology and plant biology.”
The not-for-profit AW Howard Memorial Trust has awarded more than 400 grants of various descriptions since it was established in 1964 by the then Australian Institute of Agricultural Science (now Ag Institute Australia) through donations from benefactors.
The Trust is managed by a committee drawn from Ag Institute Australia, The Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, the University of Adelaide, the South Australian Research and Development Institute which is a division of the SA Department of Primary Industries and Regions (PIRSA) and scientists experienced in crops and pastures including tropical pastures.
More information about the Trust is available here.