 Thank you very much, Justin. So what I'd like to talk a bit today about is slightly different to what's gone before. I've put up the property title of improved photosynthesis, kind of the basis to yield revolution. And I'd like to present some of the concepts that are basically being proposed in that in terms of how can you improve photosynthesis and improve the yield potential across. And secondly, I'd like to give you an overview of how the new center of excellence in translational photosynthesis is going to be involved in trying to attempt to make some of this what I talked about a reality. So what is the basis for actually thinking of a new year of revolution and that's contained in this diagram here? Where basically if you look at the yields that over the last 40 years or so, they've been increasing at a certain rate in regards to wheat and rice. Wheat and rice have been increasing at a certain rate but over the last 10 years or so, the yield increases have stagnated but population growth has kept going. And so it's led to the notion that we need to do something about improving yields to more closely match the population and demand and the yield of our current staple crops. And I'd provocatively put down here that the first year of revolution was based on harvest index and thermalizer responses and the second yielded increase here may be underpinned by improved field of photosynthesis but that remains to be proven. So what are the roots to increasing yield? And there's two obvious roots that you can exploit. One is narrowing the yield gap and when I say the yield gap, it's the differences between what can actually be achieved under optimal conditions but what is actually achieved in the field under the existing agronomic practices. I've got to be... Is that better? I think so. All right. So you can do things like improving water use, improving nutrient use and supply, improving pest and disease management and improved agronomic practice but that's just to get you up to the yield potential but you can also take approaches that increase the yield potential and two of those that are the most significant ones are improving the photosynthetic efficiency and increasing the harvest index. The increasing the harvest index is not so important for biomass crops where you basically harvest the whole crop but it's important for things like wheat and maize where you're only harvesting a particular organ in the plant. But improving yield potential and yield gap approaches are out of you in that the approaches are aimed to reduce the yield gaps may be set to capture the low-hanging fruit. So I think David LaValle talked in his talk yesterday about we're all used to improving yield by optimizing pest management, optimizing water use, optimizing nutrient use but improving photosynthesis is about changing the fundamental rules that were under which photosynthesis occurs and I think a clear example that was on actually David LaValle's slide which showed transpiration use against yield and maize basically fell on a totally different line to wheat and rice and that slope of that line is basically dependent upon a different mode of photosynthesis in maize versus wheat and rice and that's what we're talking about by changing the rules that you change the fundamental equations that govern the efficiency of which CO2 is captured in relation to light absorption. And the good thing about improving photosynthesis is that it has the potential to improve yield under those optimal and non-optimal agronomic conditions. So while we talk about yield potential as being something that sets the upper yield by improving photosynthesis there's a potential for that to carry through under water stress conditions, nutrient limited conditions as well as the best conditions that the field can offer. So what are the yield potential determinants? So out of this we see that basically this is the Monteith equation but it simply can be broken down as the yield is proportional to the solar energy at the incident on the crop times the efficiency which light is intercepted by the crop times efficiency which that light is converted into CO2 capture and then a petitioning of coefficient the extent to which the carbon is then petitioned towards yield products. And as I alluded to in my first slide that over the past 50 years yield has been increased by optimising harvest index in response to fertiliser and it seems that harvest index above 60% is unlikely and fertilisers are running out. And that leads you to the basically the concept that further increases in yield, crop yield potential can probably only be achieved by inipidating light conversion efficiency and that's photosynthesis. So does photosynthesis limit crop yields and the answer is from my perspective a clean yes and basically the evidence for that lies in the responses to CO2 and David LaBelle showed this that when you grow plants that are elevated CO2 essentially what you're doing is improving photosynthetic efficiency. You're basically saturating the CO2 fixing enzyme rubisco with more CO2 making it more efficient making it more like a C4 mace plant and yields in these plants so then this is the data from one experiment in this regard where the yield difference went up by 15% and if you analyze that it's due to an increase in energy conversion efficiency of about 18% and that's due to the improved rubisco activity. So that but presumably we can so one way you can resolve or increase photosynthetic efficiency is to wait for CO2 to rise and that will occur in time and I guess we're all concerned about that but the other way is to take directed efforts to try and change those processes that we know are limiting. So if I just make that for the non plant biologists in the field in the audience just to give you a snapshot of the leaf so photosynthesis occurs in the leaf light is incident on the leaf surface here. It's absorbed by chloroplasts that are arrayed within the leaf and they're in contact with air spaces and these air spaces allow the CO2 and water vapor and oxygen to interact and exchange with the cells and the chloroplasts of the leaf and stomata on the outside of the leaves are basically there to mediate the exchange of water vapor, oxygen and CO2 with the chloroplasts within that leaf and it's this process of chloroplast and gas exchange which basically underlies the efficiency of photosynthesis. Well, in various places around the world and A&U has been a key leader in this in various areas we've had three decades of photosynthesis research that have been able to pinpoint various targets that one could identify for improving photosynthetic efficiency and this is a slide just to explain the photosynthesis process and where you might look. So light is absorbed by the light harvesting machinery of the chloroplasts and that has a certain efficiency associated with it. Energy is then producing that light energy through an electron transport process in the chloroplast to produce energy and that energy in a separate system is used by the CO2 fixing machinery within the leaf to capture CO2 and convert it into sugars and biomass and so that you can look at various aspects of the light harvesting, like energy conversion machinery has been in need of certain aspects of improvement. You can look at the CO2 fixing carbon cycle enzymes here as having various inefficiencies and I'll delve into those in some more or less detail as we go along. The transforming photosynthesis is really about transforming the way in which light energy available to the incident, to the leaf within the field is converted into biomass and at the moment we only have available a narrow spectrum of light energy here from about 400 to 700 nanometers which is about 50% of the incident light energy befalling on the leaf and only about 4% to 6% of that is finally converted into carbon fixed by the plant and what the aim of improving photosynthesis will be to increase this energy conversion to something from about 4% to 6% to 8% energy conversion by opening the window for light harvesting and improving the efficiency of light energy conversion to CO2 and even enlarging the capacity with which the leaf undertakes CO2 fixation. So out of that, if you look at this chloroplastic process here we have various targets that you can set up and this is both within our set of excellence as well as around the world that various targets have been identified as ways to improve photosynthesis. You can enhance light utilization in various ways whether it be by expanding the solar spectrum which can be absorbed by the leaf or just displaying the leaf area in a more effective way so that you basically capture more of the light energy falling on the crop. You can improve CO2 utilization by CO3 plants and I'm very specific here that a C4 plant has already done a lot of this and improved the CO2 fixing capability because it's CO2 concentration ability but in a C3 plant it's proposed that you can improve the CO2 fixing ability by improving rubisco creating CO2 concentrated mechanisms within the C3 leaf which don't already exist there and improving a process called photorespiration which actually deals with the waste byproducts of the rubisco reaction which I'll talk about in a little while time. At the electron transport level you can boost the electron transport supply through the energy producing system of the chloroplast here which uses the light energy, modulate leaf development anatomy, increase our understanding of the response of crop photosynthesis to the environmental factors so we can better predict where is the best place to make effective changes to photosynthesis and we can also look at selecting for natural variation within plants that already exist there so that screening existing cultivars of existing germ plants and for better photosynthetic performances is also an option that exists. So what is the ARC center of excellence for translational photosynthesis about? And I guess it could be captured in the sense of to increase plant yield potential through improved photosynthesis. It's funded by the Australian Research Council and universities that are possibly 30 million dollars over seven years so it's a significant effort in this field and it involves interactions between the Australian National University, University of Queensland, University of Sydney and University of Western Sydney at a university level but we also have partner organizations in CSRO plant industry and the International Rice Research Institute. So that's what we're in the business at the moment trying to put this center together and get it off the ground as a functional entity to undertake some of the projects that we'd like to explore. We've got a research program that is looked at here in terms of trying to cover the various aspects of which the ways that you can improve photosynthesis. We've got a program to look at improved CO2 fixation covering how you can fix CO2 more effectively, increasing light energy conversion, exploiting natural variation and also bringing in modeling and field testing performance. And one of the big challenges is going to be is how we test whether or not changes that we've made at these levels here in regard to directed changes which are made through genetic interventions in light energy and CO2 fixation capabilities and also selecting natural variants actually perform in the field and how we might expect them to perform based on what we know about models of photosynthesis. And hopefully this integrated effort will lead to improved yields and the start of a potential to actually improving that improving photosynthesis will actually lead to an opportunity to increase yield potential in C3 plants. I'll give you a couple of examples of how we can potentially, what projects we have involved in the center. I won't go into it in sources detail, but enhancing Ribisco performance is one of our targets in the CO2 fixing, CO2 capture area. So for those of you who don't know Ribisco, Ribisco is an enzyme that exists in the chloroplastin relief. It's the enzyme that underpins most of the oryntrophic CO2 fixation in the world, most of the biomass in the world has passed through the active side of Ribisco in terms of its production. And Ribisco has evolved since times back 3.5 billion years ago when it was an enzyme that had high CO2 levels and was exposed to no oxygen in the atmosphere. And it went through a transition where basically CO2 levels fell, oxygen increased and it had to cope with this. It's the best enzyme for the job, but it has its faults. It's slow in terms of its overall candidate capability. Its affinity for CO2 is low. And this is the primary reason that in fact why sentry plants respond to increase CO2 is because of the low affinity for Ribisco for CO2. And it also interacts with oxygen. So it's obvious then that one of the things that you would like to do has been a long held aim in photosynthesis research that we can improve this enzyme in some way or another to make it more effective in terms of its performance at ambient CO2 levels. One other thing that relates to global climate change is that this enzyme also gets a lot worse of higher temperatures. And it's the reason that C4 plants do better at high temperatures than a WIP plant. So a maize plant that they were evolved under high hot dry conditions when Ribisco is most limited for photosynthesis. So that improving Ribisco is particularly relevant under high temperature conditions in a global climate change world. So that you would like to make it an enzyme that had a better capacity to fix CO2, less ability to interact with oxygen and produced a faster rate of enzymatic reaction for unit nitrogen invested in this enzyme. So the sort of strategies you take to it too, and these are being undertaken in various ways around the world including in the center of excellence, is you can identify better from Ribisco's from natural germ plasma that already exists out there. And there's already evidence that Ribisco does different in its kinetic properties. So a maize plant because of the fact that Ribisco exists in a high CO2 environment in maize plant has very different kinetic properties to the enzyme in a WIP plant. And there's evidence from that that the Ribisco kinetics have adapted to the CO2 level that it's found itself growing in. And so that by looking out there of a range of Ribisco enzymes from different sources, you may just identify a better Ribisco. Then you'd have the opportunity for transplanting those better Ribisco's into target crop plants. And if you knew about enough about the Ribisco enzymes that you may be able to alter the chloroplast genes that code for these Ribisco's to actually make it more effective in terms of its performance. But this is underlaid by the ability to actually know that you can change the Ribisco because the Ribisco is actually coded for in the chloroplast of the plant in terms of the large subunit and actually getting the enzyme into the chloroplast and getting expressed as certain challenges which I won't go into today but it's an integrated process. The other thing that you could get at in terms of enhancing photosynthesis is that, and this is really the approach that the MAIS plan has taken is you can enhance the CO2 level around Ribisco. So two ways in which the photosynthesis has been proved itself over time is you either change the enzyme or you change the CO2 level around Ribisco. And you can, we propose to introduce various CO2 supply mechanisms into C3 plants to enhance CO2 in the chloroplast. And that might include specific transporters to transport bicarbonate into the chloroplast to generate CO2 in the chloroplast or specific aquapor and plug proteins that facilitate the transfer of CO2 in a somewhat passive fashion across the chloroplast envelope. In this extent, we've learned from evolutionary studies that not all, so also C4 plants have done a CO2-concentrating mechanism in a certain way of using a bundle sheath and a mesofil cell differentiation. Other single-cell organisms such as cyanobacteria have done it differently. So a cyanobacteria concentrates CO2 by accumulating bicarbonate in a cytosol using various bicarbonate and CO2 transporters that are present in the cell. And confining Ribisco to a structure called a caboxysynome within the cell. And this is the region within the cell in which Ribisco, CO2 is elevated specifically around Ribisco and it uses bicarbonate from the cytosol to generate the CO2 within that caboxysynome. So the notion that it's not hard to derive that why can't you actually put a bicarbonate transporter within, into the chloroplast envelope? This position within the cyanobacteria, given that a chloroplast is in fact a cyanobacteria of symbion, is an equivalent position for the transporter within the chloroplast. And if you, and we've modeled it in various ways to show that given the resistances to CO2E flux within the chloroplast and the rates at which you could transport bicarbonate, you can have significant effects on elevating CO2 within the chloroplast of a C3 plant. And so we're taking various strategies at the moment to increase the CO2 concentration within the chloroplast by engineering bicarbonate pumps from various sources into the chloroplast of a model C3 plants. And what is the impetus for Australia in this effort? I mean, basically, improving photosynthesis is a fundamental and untapped opportunity for raising prop yield. And I think that that's not just our conclusion, it's the conclusion of a number of groups and companies around the world. And I think we need to explore that. And in this context, Australians, the world lives in photosynthesis research and we have generated fundamental contributions to this area over a various time. At various times over the past three decades, we have new tools available to link laboratory field research and molecular genomics and phenomics and crop modeling together to achieve outcomes. And we have an opportunity with regard to the Center of Excellence to translate fundamental discoveries in photosynthesis into the field and improve yield potential. And there's an opportunity for Australia to be a world leader. And I guess that's really the aim of the Center of Excellence to basically use it as an opportunity to test whether or not we can translate some of the opportunities that were identified in photosynthetic improvement into changes that are expressed that we can introduce in the model species, introduce those changes into crop plants and test them in the field and really have a good go at working out, proving one way or the other, whether or not improved photosynthesis can be achieved by these mechanisms and whether or not it can be the basis for new revolution. So thank you.