SOUTHERN Downs agricultural scientists are continuing to take home-grown research abroad.

The success of a $4.6million sorghum research program, co-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, is expanding to encompass more grain species.

Professor in Plant Breeding and Genetics David Jordan and Department of Agriculture and Fisheries principal research scientist Dr Emma Mace are part of the project that has taken them to Ethiopia.

The pair are now preparing for another trip where they have been applying research to help improve sorghum breeding approaches and establish drought-hardy sorghum crops.

"The first project just focussing on sorghum has been going for about four and a half years and looking at two things,” Prof Jordan said.

"Firstly it has been about trying to improve the performance and effectiveness of the sorghum plant breeding program.

"The second goal was to understand the genes controlling important drought-resistance mechanisms.

"Because the first project went so well, the Foundation has expanded the breeding program improvement work to maize, chickpeas, common bean and wheat.”

The new four-year project kicked off late last year with a budget of $8million, $2million of which will go to Hermitage scientists, while the remainder will go to the Ethiopian government agency.

Dr Mace, who also has a joint appointment with the University of Queensland, explained advancements in agricultural research helped s ecure food sources overseas and in Australia.

"Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa, with about 100million people in an area about the size of New South Wales,” she said.

"Last year they had the worst drought in the country in 50 years but they didn't have as widespread famine as they had in the mid-1980s and that was largely owing to investment and improvement in agriculture, and growing rates of education too.”

Compared to the average Australian farm size of 800 hectares, Dr Mace said Ethiopian farms were typically far smaller at only one to two hectares.

She said crop failures in these farms could be devastating for families who relied upon them as a food source and thus it was important to develop plants that could withstand drought and disease.

Prof Jordan said the breeding programs were designed to identify new varieties that have a greater yield or are more resistant to stresses than previous crops.

"Two important drought resistance mechanisms we've highlighted in our first project with Ethiopia are root architecture and another trait called transpiration efficiency,” he said.

"Root architecture refers to the way the roots grow - some plants roots tend to go deeper or wider, and if the soils are deep it means the plant can get more water.

"Transpiration efficiency is how efficiently the plant uses water to produce carbohydrates, which is pretty hard to measure.

"When we first started there was no information about the genetic control for these but we have discovered some of the genes controlling the trait and have developed linked molecular markers.

"It means we can screen plants similarly to how someone might get screened for breast cancer for example. But instead of the screen predicting whether a person is more or less likely to develop breast cancer, we can say this plant has better root architecture or trait efficiency.”

These molecular markers can be applied to identify more water efficient sorghum both in Australia and in Ethiopia as both countries experience comparable types of drought.

Prof Jordan said it was exciting to be able to share knowledge with the team of more than 100 people involved in the second project.

"This is a really multi-disciplinary project encompassing plant breeding and genetics, molecular biology and pathology to name a few,” he said.

"The work we're talking about in the first project with drought adaptation traits has benefit for Australian farmers and our own sorghum breeding program funded by Grains Research Development Corporation.

"We have made crosses between plants that have made good characteristics but it's a complex process and a lot of what we did is teaching the Ethiopian group about those technologies we have harnessed.

"They really went beyond our expectations and part of what we're doing in the new project is continuing to help them with project management and improving their self-reliance for developing better crops faster.”