Source Certain’s Professor Ian Dadour and Managing Director, Cameron Scadding.
Source Certain International Limited (Source Certain), together with research partner Deakin University in Victoria, expands its Research and Education portfolio with a recently awarded $780,000 grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Program.
Linkage grants enable research teams from around Australia to partner with industry, business and community organisations to drive innovation and deliver outcomes and solutions to benefit all Australians.
The ARC’s Linkage Projects support collaborative research projects between higher education researchers and partner organisations in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.
Source Certain, a global leader in provenance science, is actively undertaking and collaborating with leading research providers to complete and commercialise high impact research in the sectors it operates. This includes agriculture.
Flystrike costs the Australian sheep industry an estimated $280 million a year in chemical costs, labour, wool loss and death of animals. The exact make-up of the chemical signals leading to fly attraction is not well characterised, leading to a fundamental knowledge gap, which this project seeks to bridge.
This multidisciplinary project includes entomology, biotechnology, analytical chemistry and genomics. Building on the unique analytical and entomological platforms developed at Source Certain and Deakin University, the team will undertake a combination of genome analysis and advanced chemical analysis to provide unique insights into the mechanisms underpinning the attraction of the Australian blowfly to merino sheep.
The study will deliver the step change required by the Australian sheep production industry to achieve cost-effective, region-specific prevention of flystrike.
Source Certain’s Head of Research and Education and renowned forensic entomologist, Professor Ian Dadour will lead the Source Certain part of the project. Professor Dadour said, “We are looking forward to collaborating with Deakin University on this important project. As applied scientists, we also look forward to getting out into our sheep producing regions here in WA and meeting with and working with the farmers.”
The project will be field-tested in the sheep farming communities of Western Australia and Victoria.
ARC funding is awarded on the basis of a competitive process and peer review to support the highest-quality researchers and research projects across the science disciplines.
Media contact information
Rose Aitken
M: +61 0434 749 574
George Hazim
M: +61 417 516 262
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