A former SCRI PhD student, Dr Peter Waterhouse, has been awarded the prestigious 2007 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in Australia.

He received the award along with fellow CSIRO Plant Industry researcher, Dr Ming-Bo Wang, for their discovery and development of a gene silencing mechanism that is causing a revolution in crop, medical and livestock research around the world.

The researchers discovered double-stranded RNA-induced gene silencing in plants, a naturally occurring mechanism evolved to turn down or switch off the activity of genes, following an observation made while working to understand how plants protect themselves from virus attack.

Gene silencing has since been developed into a highly effective tool for gene discovery and determining gene function in humans, animals, plants and insects.

“Once we found the gene silencing mechanism we knew we were onto something big. We felt confident that if we could learn how to direct it, we would be able to control different types of plant genes for different purposes,” Dr Waterhouse said.

The Canberra-based team’s first success was when they used gene silencing to enable plant genes to resist diseases, including Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus, which can cause yield losses of about 15-25 per cent in cereals such as wheat and barley.

“Since then we’ve worked to improve the efficiency of our technology, making it an extremely precise, rapid and user-friendly tool for identifying genes and their function,” Dr Waterhouse said.

The CSIRO gene silencing technology is currently used in more than 3,000 laboratories around the world on a diverse range of projects, including developing new crop varieties, and it holds tremendous promise as a therapeutic agent to control disease in humans and animals.

The $300,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, the nation’s premier science award, is presented to Australian scientists who promote human welfare through an outstanding achievement in science or technology.

Dr Waterhouse gained his PhD at SCRI in 1981. Read more on the CSIRO website news release page.