SRA QUARANTINE: RECENT INNOVATIONS TO DELIVER NEW VARIETIES FASTER

SUGAR RESEARCH AUSTRALIA (SRA) provides a quarantine service for the Australian sugarcane industry to import and move sugarcane germplasm in a safe and efficient manner. This includes: importing sugarcane varieties from overseas to evaluate their performance and usefulness to Australia; movement of sugarcane from NSW into Queensland for crossing and plant breeding trials; and movement of sugarcane between Sugarcane Biosecurity Zones for plant breeding trials and disease resistance screening. Over the past six years, SRA quarantine has implemented several innovations that have streamlined the quarantine system, leading to significant time savings in the plant breeding program. For within-Queensland germplasm movement from southern and central regions to the Burdekin, Herbert and northern regions, the quarantine time has been reduced from one year to four months, allowing for rapid exchange of promising clones for inclusion in Final Assessment Trials (FATs) in other regions and as parents. In international quarantine, tissue culture propagation has allowed foreign varieties to be assessed in plant breeding and disease resistance screening trials within two years of quarantine release—this is up to a three-year saving on time. These innovations have allowed the plant breeding program access to more germplasm faster and has had effects in other areas, such as facilitating earlier ratings for Pachymetra root rot in the breeding program. This paper will describe the recent innovations in SRA quarantine and the benefits these changes bring to the industry.