Page 87 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

Foreword
Introduction
DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE
PEOPLE AND CONTEXTS
Addressing South Africa’s
bioeconomy strategy
South Africa was one of the first countries globally to publish a
formal bioeconomy strategy, through its Department of Science and Technology, in 2013. The forestry and forest products industry, in particular, is a major contributor to GDP and employment, even though commercial planted forests take up only around 2% of the land. Since climate and soil limits expansion into new land, research programmes at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, and FABI, have been involved in partnership with many players in the South African forestry industry to address tree improvement through biotechnology. Major focus areas are the biology and genetics influencing growth, wood properties and the processability of trees, as well as tree pest and disease resistance.
In the past decade several technologies have emerged, evolved, converged and aligned
to transform the landscape of agricultural biotechnology. In particular, high throughput DNA sequencing, undergoing several generations of improvement since 2007, has meant a tipping point in reading DNA and whole genomes of hundreds of economically important species and populations within these species, which accelerates gene and pathway discovery and breeding predictions based on DNA. In 2007, there were genomes for only four land plants. Today there are hundreds of biologically, commercially and/or evolutionarily important plant genomes available to researchers around the world. Reference genomes now make it possible to involve other ‘omics related to the biology of the plant (such as gene and protein expression, or valuable metabolic products) and, by so doing, to discover and identify regions in the genome linked
to traits of industrial or commercial interest. Computational methodology and processing
power are applied to model this ‘systems biology’ – integrating information from hundreds of samples, and tens of thousands of genes, proteins, metabolites and other measurable cellular components.
More recently, genome editing has accelerated the rate and regulatory implication of altering the genetic code of a plant and, alongside this, the nascent field of synthetic biology promises the engineering of entire pathways and even chromosomes for advanced metabolic engineering of plants.
The near future will see an even larger explosion of data, including phenomics (high throughput measurements of hundreds to thousands of plant traits), environmental conditions, the microbiome, and data on the interactions between genotype and these factors. Analysis of data of this scope and size will in all likelihood require the application of artificial intelligence (AI) through machine learning, to integrate and make accurate predictions from complex inter- related datapoints, to drive the new biotechnology of plant biomass. Emerging markets around wood-pulp polymers and their derivatives in many industries, as well as solid wood applications for modern building such as cross-laminated timber, are promising areas driving investment in woody biomass research.
HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
PLANET AND SUSTAINABILITY
Context
Awards
Lead Researchers
85
Wilhelm de Beer