I'm just waiting until a biotech company now works out how to...

I'm just waiting until a biotech company now works out how to implant these santanol encoding genes into a commonly grown transgenic oilseed crop like canola or soybeans ... with the price of sandalwood oil it would be naive to think there are not plant breeders looking at such opportunities. Not going to happen overnight though. The smartest thing FPC could do is stitch up ownership of these genes ...

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The good oil is in the genes
Jill Rowbotham | September 09, 2009
Article from: The Australian
SUCCESSFUL sandalwood cultivation carries with it a set of problems as complex as its famous oils.

Liz Barbour has an intimate knowledge of them all, via her association with various research projects. At last there has been a breakthrough that may sort out the most pressing of these, says Barbour, manager of seed technologies at the West Australian government's Forest Products Commission.

A collaboration between the FPC, the University of Western Australia and the University of British Columbia has discovered the gene responsible for the production of sandalwood oil.

Scientists extracted nucleic acid from the wood's oil-producing tissues, identified the genes within it and discovered one of them, santalene synthase, triggered the production of four essential oils.

Now this key gene has been identified it will be possible to design a test to work out which trees will yield oil, Barbour says. At present this cannot be ascertained until tropical sandalwood trees are seven years old and native sandalwoods are 15.

"You can wait until a plantation is 15 years old and some trees will have produced oil and some nothing at all," Barbour says.

"So now we have this tool, we can test the sandalwood in seed form and tell straight away if it is going to produce oil or not. We used to have to wait eight to 15 years. This provides us with huge clarity. And we want to see if there is some sort of treatment that will 'switch on' the tree if it is not producing."

Considering that there are 400 to 500 trees planted a hectare, an average of 20 per cent failing to produce provides a considerable incentive to find such a switch.

The lion's share of sandalwood production is in India. In Western Australia it was the foundation of a flourishing industry in the 19th century, based on the wheatbelt and the gold fields.

But shortages of the natural products in India and in Australia have allowed a market in synthetic sandalwood oil to grow up.

"Steady growth in demand has grown beyond what we can supply. People use the oils for perfumes, religious ceremonies and natural mosquito repellent," Barbour says.

Undersupply was exacerbated by spike disease in India, which caused the loss of natural plantings, while in Australia there was over-harvesting, and alteration of habitat by foxes and other feral animals.

Now, Barbour says, the race is on to work out how to establish and sustain cultivated sandalwood - there are large plantations in the tropical north of Western Australia as well as the traditional areas - in the hope of preventing the synthetic oil industry establishing an unbreakable grip on the market.

In WA about $25million of native sandalwood product is produced annually and there has been a $500m investment into native and tropical plantations, of which substantial harvesting will begin in 2016.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26045743-30417,00.html