Late last year, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announced an exciting new partnership for both Australian science and the global push for renewable energies.

Local agricultural biotechnology company Farmacule and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have partnered with Syngenta, the world's largest agribusiness company, to develop and commercialise cost-effective cellulosic ethanol from sugarcane waste.

The partnership is being driven in Australia by Professor James Dale, an internationally renowned biotechnology researcher and director of the new Renewable Biocommodities Precinct at QUT. Dale is also the chief scientific officer and company director of Farmacule, which was set up to commercialise this new area of research.

In 2005, Dale's group at QUT secured a Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to apply their genetic engineering expertise to growing biofortified crop plants for use in developing nations, including rice. Syngenta provides some of the molecular technology to the Golden Rice project for its humanitarian program.

And so, during the regular meetings for participants in the Grand Challenges programs, Dale got to know Syngenta's head of biotechnology, Adrian Dubock, who was on the humanitarian board of the Golden Rice project and who is credited as the architect of the public-private partnership that has made Golden Rice possible.

"We got to talking one day about bioethanol and sugar cane and Adrian said how interested Syngenta was to get into this space - they were already in similar ventures with corn - and how interested they were in our technology," Dale says. This really set the ball rolling."

The next cog fell into place at BIO 2006 in Chicago. Dale invited Dubock to address a lunch that QUT hosts at BIO each year and managed to wangle a seat next to Bligh, who was deputy premier at the time. "The discussion moved to biofuels ... and away it went from there."

Dale and QUT started negotiations with Syngenta at the end of 2006 and approximately 12 months later, a deal was signed. "The Queensland Government has put $2 million into the venture already (with more promised) and Anna Bligh has personally shown a lot of interest. So, she really has been there right from the start, which has been invaluable support for us."

Core technology

The technology that caught Syngenta's interest was developed by Dale and colleagues several years ago at QUT and called INPACT. Farmacule was spun out of QUT in 2001 based on INPACT, which stands for 'in-plant activation' and involves the activation and amplification of transgene expression in plants. It is like a molecular switch, as Dale explains.

"When you put a gene in a plant using this technology, you can control when it is turned on and you can turn it on at very high levels of expression," he says.

This molecular technology was developed originally to make high-value proteins in tobacco plants, with the first product from that project due to market by 2009.

In the context of the sugar cane to ethanol project, INPACT will allow researchers to make transgenic plants that express cellulose-hydrolysing enzymes at a specific time (so that the plant is not damaged) and at high levels. In this way, cellulose in the cane bagasse (the dry biomass left over after sugar extraction) can be efficiently and cost-effectively converted to fuel-grade bioethanol without compromising the sugar extraction.

The INPACT technology was certainly pivotal in the case Dale put forward to Syngenta during the early negotiations, but the clincher according to him was the total package that Farmacule and QUT could bring to the table.

Besides their internationally established expertise and facilities in plant biotechnology, the research centre at QUT headed by Dale also houses the Sugar Innovations and Research Initiative. "This means we could actually provide technology and expertise to go from the gene discovery and genetic modifications step right through to pilot production and processing."

The partnership has now taken shape under Dale's umbrella at QUT as the Syngenta Centre for Sugarcane and Biofuels Development. Ten new scientists are being employed to work on the project, with four employed directly by Syngenta and the rest employed through QUT.

"We are now at the stage of putting all the different components together. We will have our team here and one based in North Carolina, so the project can use the combined resources most effectively and efficiently."