Western Australia's agriculture minister, Kim Chance, is taking what many are now seeing as an overly cautious stance on biotechnology. Graeme O'Neill reports.

The Western Australian branch of industry association AusBiotech has held a forum to examine the issues facing agricultural biotechnology in the state, and the challenges that must be faced if it is to move forward.

CSIRO Plant Industry released its new low-glyceaemic index barley last week: BARLEYMax, developed from a mutant form of an old 'lab rat' strain of barley called Himalaya.

CSIRO has shuffled divisions to create new business units in a bid to maximise its research capabilities, the organisation announced today.

Adelaide company TGR Biosciences has received a grant from the Gardiner Foundation to look for bioactives in milk.

The Geoffrey Gardiner Dairy Foundation has announced the inaugural recipients of its major research and development funding initiative.

Bioprocessing and fermentation are essential parts of the biotechnology product development cycle. If a drug or therapeutic is produced by a living organism, whether it's bacteria, yeast, plant cells or mammalian cells, some form of large-scale fermentation or culture is required to produce the entity, and usually some form of downstream processing is necessary to extract, purify, concentrate and formulate the end product.