In this episode of AHRI Snapshots, we catch up with an international guest. Dr Juan Vorster is an Associate Professor in Plant and Soil Sciences from the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Juan is studying herbicide resistance mechanisms in weeds and the development of effective management strategies for these weeds.

He’s currently in Perth for a conference, so it’s a great opportunity to have a chat and learn more about his research.

To learn more about Juan's research, visit the University of Pretoria's website. 

You can follow AHRI on Twitter here. To learn more about AHRI's research and team, check out the website here.

In this AHRI Snapshots, we catch up with Principal Research fellow, Dr Qin Yu about her latest paper on glyphosate resistance in goosegrass. 

This paper was published in Nature Communications in August 2023, which is an impressive achievement. 

This paper is complicated, but essentially the researchers have found a hot spot on the genome of goosegrass that is a herbicide resistance generator.

In this research, the team found that in glyphosate-resistant goosegrass the EPSPS gene was translocated to the sub-telomer region and duplicated many times there, leading to glyphosate resistance occurring.

This work is useful not only in resistance gene discovery, but also in the development of gene-based next generation herbicides, like RNAi, as well as genetic reversal of resistance.

It will also contribute to studying the weediness and adaptation of this global weed species.  

Paper: ‘Subtelomeric 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase copy number variation confers glyphosate resistance in Eleusine indica’

You can follow AHRI on Twitter here. To learn more about AHRI's research and team, check out the website here.

Over the last few years, the AHRI agronomy team has done extensive work looking at crop competition in hybrid and open-pollinated canola.

Project lead, Dr Mike Ashworth, joins us on this podcast to discuss the findings on ideal seeding rate, variety, row spacing and seed size.

Herbicides are currently working quite well in canola. We know that herbicide resistance is a real threat though, so we discuss what the current trends are in herbicide use in canola crops and what growers need to do to mitigate herbicide resistance. 

You can follow AHRI on Twitter here. To learn more about AHRI's research and team, check out the website here.