Best of the best, elite Jatropha pgx Gen3 unpruned. 3.5 months in the ground, from 200mm seedlings. Neither climate nore soil are ideal but performance is good.
Polygenomic Paulownia, elite K3 line, 3.5 months old. (Malcolm is 5’10” or 178cm). Heavy soil (not ideal), high rainfall area – after hail damage.
Jatropha pgx Gen2 mother plants, pruned heavily in previous year for cuttings, not pruned prior to flowering current year. Plants in picture are all 1 year old, of different polygenomic lines.
Lajos with one of the elite Jatropha pgx Gen3 unpruned. 3.5 months in the ground, from 200mm seedlings. Neither climate nore soil are ideal but performance is good.
The Editor
Tasmanian Times
If it were the 14th April 1912 and we were sitting in small boat in the North Atlantic with the Titanic sinking slowly, inexorably to our South it could not hold a greater quotient of morbid fascination for us than the current tragedy playing out in the Tasmanian forest industry.
It is a tragedy for us all in the loss of jobs, the loss of habitat, the loss of assets, the loss of capital, the loss of community, and the lost opportunity to – build a valuable renewable resource for the nation and wealth for Tasmania.
It is a peculiar tragedy for me and my Company because we hold a key piece of a solution. It is only a piece in a wider puzzle, but it is the rarest, the most impactful, the game-changing piece; a piece around which all of the other pieces could be rallied. But it has been ignored. For years.
We’re plant epigeneticists. One definition of that term could be “plant evolutionists” because we are able to access the natural adaptive processes which enable plants to evolve to meet and overcome environmental stresses (think global warming, it’s happened before; think salinity, because that’s happened too; think pest and diseases, because they are continually in competition with plants).
In our 35 years of laboratory work we have developed the unique ability to induce (or “trigger”) a wide range of natural adaptive responses in plants. One such response is a rare but natural phenomenon called “polyploidy” in which the plant will increase the number of cellular copies of its unchanged and very normal genomes. The resultant plants are called “polyploids” though we reserve that name for spontaneous examples, and apply the name “polygenomics” to the ones we develop in a deliberate and targeted fashion.
Polygenomic trees are cool for a whole range of reasons: For starters, they are around 50% more carbon efficient than their standard cousins, and so they grow faster by virtue of packing in more atmospheric carbon in less time than their (diploid) peers. In some of the species with which we work, we end up with the equivalent of a 10-year old diploid in just 4 years with the 4-year old poly having the same density, fibre length and wood quality as its 10-year old diploid peer.
Now, if that fact alone doesn’t light up a whole lot of realisations around the application of this technology to forestry, then I’m talking to the wrong people – again!
By the way, from a climate change point of view, poly’s make really good sense because, by virtue of their increased photosynthetic efficiency they grow bigger and faster using no more nutrients than their diploid peers. They only thing they use more of, is atmospheric carbon! (If you’re having trouble with this, consider your family car. We can make it go faster by doubling the size of its engine, but it would use more petrol. Or we could turbo-charge it, and use more air but same amount of petrol and so go faster! Meet the turbocharged trees!)
There’s more. Poly’s are also tough (they are the result of a stress response, remember, so it should not be too much of a stretch to imagine that they are tougher, right?). They tolerate higher and lower temperatures. Gee, where could that be a good thing?
And they are more adaptive, and so we can stress them to take up mining waste, toxic water, salt, organic compounds – in fact there’s not much that trees can’t learn to tolerate. In some case, they don’t just tolerate the stressor, they come to thrive on it!
So I suppose we come to the big questions:
• Are these GMOs? No. These are natural plants, we’ve just worked out how to trigger them. Anyway, you’re eating polyploidy wheat, corn and a host of other food products right now, and have been for centuries, and those are all recognised as natural phenomena in all of the GMO regulations. Our trees are the same.
• Why haven’t you talked to Gunns? We did. They didn’t ask any questions, and said we didn’t fit their mould of decade-long breeding cycles. End of conversation.
• Why haven’t you talked to the Government? We did – and we still are. Nothing has happened yet, and we aren’t holding our breaths.
• Why don’t you talk to the Unions? We called. We’d like to explore how faster-growing, shorter-rotation forests create 50% more jobs. Still waiting for a call back.
• Why don’t you talk to the Environmentalists? We called. We’d like to explain how our trees expire 50% more oxygen, improve the microclimate and provide more resources while using no more inputs from the environment other than CO2. We’re still waiting for their call, too.
• Why don’t you talk to the press? We did. They listened. That’s why your reading this. What can you do to help?
Regards,
Peter Rowe
Managing Director
PolyGenomX, http://www.polygenomx.com/the-company
Level 4, 130 Bundall Road, Bundall Q 4217
PO Box 6566 Gold Coast MC Q 9726 Australia
P +617 5510 3166 | F +617 5510 3544 |
Skype: PolyGenomX
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