Supercharging the tree of life.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Australia is a completely different world from the one where Western’s Dr. Ryan McQuinn grew up. The Finger Lakes region of upstate New York sits just south of the smallest of the Great Lakes, Lake Ontario – which would stretch from Sydney to Tamworth if it could be transplanted here – and its mountainous oak and hickory forests are a far cry from the flat ochre landscapes that characterise so much of Australia. But while Dr. McQuinn’s research will benefit agriculture around the world, it’s arid countries like Australia that will benefit the most from his innovative field of study.

Image: Dr. Ryan McQuinn.

Dr. McQuinn has been up close and personal with food for most of his career. During his PhD at Cornell University in upstate New York, he researched the accumulation of cancer-fighting carotenoids in ripening tomatoes. Since his completion of his doctorate at ANU in 2015, he has been researching carotenoid breakdown products (i.e. apocarotenoids) and their role in floral development in food crops.

The team at Western led by Dr. McQuinn is hoping to identify the biological factors that regulate flower development. “We have a signal that will make sure that the flower forms as it should,” said Dr. McQuinn. “If that signal isn’t there, it may have the potential to impact crop yield and quality. Furthering our understanding of flower development, we can hopefully manipulate crops to be able to flower earlier, or produce more flowers, and increase yield.” This means more high quality food from each plant, meeting the demands of an ever-growing population for readily available, nutritious fresh food.

Encompassing a wide variety of compounds, apocarotenoids have unique protective roles in plants, but the exact profile of the apocarotenoids differs between plants. Dr. McQuinn’s team will be researching how the application of certain apocarotenoid profiles to other crops such as fruit and leafy vegetables can help them withstand stresses such as excess salination, drought and excess heat. He is hoping that the apocarotenoid profiles can be isolated, reproduced and applied to plants externally – hopefully some kind of spray – to create a low-cost, accessible, organic protection for food crops.

Importantly, Dr. McQuinn’s research is based on compounds that plants already produce naturally, improving health outcomes for both consumers and the environment. “The compounds we’re researching are plant-derived,” said Dr. McQuinn. “They’re not like pesticides or herbicides that are man-made, they’re created from what the plant already makes to protect itself against stress. We’re hoping to apply these compounds before the stress occurs, like a pre-emptive armour, so the plants are more resilient and can put more of their energy into food production.”

“A lot of people have said that Australia is the ‘canary in the coalmine’ of what’s going to happen with climate change,” said Dr. McQuinn. “We’re already seeing our arable, productive land threatened by climate change. Globally, unpredictable climates are negatively impacting fresh water resources. Australia has always done it tough, but with droughts becoming longer and more frequent, our agricultural industry is going to struggle.”

The issue of food security is the main driver behind Dr. McQuinn’s research focus. “Climate change is making things very, very unpredictable, and we cannot ensure that we can produce enough food in the future unless we can respond to changes in weather patterns in real-time,” he said. “We need to find ways to respond to that unpredictability when it arises, so a lot of (our research) is going to create very immediate and very precise treatments to improve crop yield and crop tolerance.” With Australia’s agricultural industry on the front line of climate change, Dr. McQuinn’s research will, hopefully, provide us with some of the tools we need to survive climate change, and guarantee food security for many decades to come.