July 29, 2003

Fears that agricultural researchers would be denied access to Western Australia’s leading research infrastructure have been temporarily averted with the extension of facilities at the WA State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre (SABC).

According to Director, Mike Jones, demand for the SABC’s facilities threatened to surpass its capacity before Murdoch University provided 24 extra laboratory spaces. However, he warned that as the centre already hosted 20 research groups and supported 200 researchers, this extra laboratory space was only a short term solution.

“Within two years the SABC will require a four floor extension. Local molecular research into food, food quality, plant and animal improvement and microbial and biomedical research is growing and the SABC, which provides the tools necessary to support this research, must grow with it,” he said.

“We faced the prospect of turning researchers away until this additional laboratory space became available and the problem will arise again soon.”

The SABC is the only WA centre to combine academic, government and commercial research at one site and so provides economies of scale through the sharing of common molecular technologies.

Besides leveraging commercial dollars to improve research facilities for public and education projects, the SABC also has a 100 per cent success rate in raising federal funds through the Australian Research Council’s Large Equipment and Infrastructure program.

“The consolidation of private, federal and state funding into a shared centre with more than $8 million worth of molecular technology has provided WA with world class research infrastructure, at minimal cost to tax-payers, while attracting substantial research investment to the state,” Professor Jones said.

The SABC has recently attracted new research investment from the Molecular Plant Breeding Co-operative Research Centre (funding six new positions), to the Australian Centre for Necrotrophic Fungal Pathogens (also funding six new positions) and the Centre for High Throughput Genetic Analysis (including new honours and PhD students).

Well welcoming these new investments, Professor Jones warned that several commercial opportunities had already been lost due to constraints on space at the SABC for the incubation and support of new companies.

“The SABC needs at least a $4.5 million extension to secure the longer term future and benefits of agricultural biotechnology research in WA,” he said.