Dr Trevor Garnett

Biography/ Background

Following undergraduate studies at the University of Adelaide I travelled to Tasmania where I obtained a PhD in Plant Physiology from the University of Tasmania, graduating in 1996 (Thesis: Ammonium and nitrate uptake by Eucalyptus nitens). In 1997 I returned to Adelaide as a post-doc in Plant Science at the University of Adelaide investigating iron transport into wheat grains with ultimate aim of addressing human iron deficiency through cereal grains with high iron availability. At the beginning of 2001 I lectured in plant nutrition in the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Adelaide. From March 2001 until January 2006 I held a position with the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) where I managed an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) funded project collaborating with China and Laos. The main aim of this project was to increase livestock production through finding and developing lucerne (alfalfa) with tolerance to abiotic stress. Since January 2006 I have been a Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) located at the Waite Research Institute where I lead a collaboration with DuPont-Pioneer (US) focussed on increasing the nitrogen use efficiency of cereals.

Research Interests

Nitrogen is one of the biggest input costs for farmers and the price is increasing because of the power used to industrially fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. Approximately 4 % of the world’s energy is used to produced nitrogen fertiliser; this causes a considerable greenhouse gas contribution. Over 100 million tonnes of nitrogen fertiliser is applied to crops each year and 60% of this on cereals. Given the costs and environmental effects associated with production and usage of nitrogen fertilisers, plants with increased nitrogen use efficiency are of great importance to future food security. Nitrogen is the fertiliser that plants require the most, but only 40-50% of the applied fertiliser is taken up by the cereal crops. The nitrogen not taken up leads to pollution of waterways and oceans, one consequence being algal blooms at river deltas causing dead zones that lead to mass fish kills. Unused nitrogen fertiliser has a further environmental impact in that it is broken down in the soil by microbes and released into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

A solution

Our research is improving the nitrogen use efficiency of cereal plants by increasing the efficiency of mechanisms that allow plants to accumulate and use nitrogen. Focussing on corn, wheat and barley the project is characterising nitrogen related processes as the physiological, biochemical and molecular level across plant lifecycles.

Publications

Recent significant publications (peer-reviewed)

Scholarly book chapters

Garnett T and Rebetzke G. 2011. Improving crop nitrogen use in dryland farming – Interactions and potential trade-offs between water- and nutrient-use efficiency. In: Rengel Z, ed. Improving Water- and Nutrient-Use Efficiency in Food Production Systems. Wiley-Blackwell, New York. Currently in production.

Refereed journal articles

Wang W-H, Köhler B, Cao F-Q, Liu G-W, Gong Y-Y, Sheng S, Song Q-C, Cheng X-Y, Garnett T, Okamoto M, Qin R, Mueller-Roeber B, Tester M, Liu L-H. 2011. Rice DUR3 mediates high-affinity urea transport and plays an effective role in improvement of urea acquisition and utilization when expressed in Arabidopsis. New Phytologist: DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8137.2011.03929.x.

Plett D, Toubia J, Garnett T, Tester M, Kaiser BN, Baumann U. 2010. Dichotomy in the NRT gene families of dicots and grass species. PLOS One 5.

Garnett TP, Conn VM, Kaiser BN. 2009. Root based approaches to improving nitrogen use efficiency in plants. Plant, Cell & Environment 32: 1272-1283.

Entry last updated: Thursday, 20 Sep 2012