Our Changing World

Geneticist Neil Gemmell has won the 2020 Hutton Medal for using DNA & new genomic technologies to better understant plants & animals.

Sequencing the tuatara genome.

Using environmental DNA to search for the Loch Ness monster.

The Trojan Female technique. Gene editing and gene drives.

The 2020 Hutton Medal winner, Professor Neil Gemmell, from the University of Otago, uses genetics and new genomic technologies to better understand the natural world.

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When you ask Neil to describe what he does he says it's complicated, because "I've got fingers in lots of pies."

What links his interests, though, is using genetics and new genomic technologies to better understand plants and animals, their evolution and population dynamics.

Neil has always been a keen communicator of genetic science, and it was a desire to show the potential of environmental DNA that led him on a high-profile hunt for the Loch Ness monster.

"Environmental DNA is, if you like, the detritus of life," says Neil. "As we move through our environment, we shed pieces of ourselves."

These traces of skin and hair contain DNA that can be sequenced and used to identify the species they came from.

"You can get a relatively quick snapshot of the species that were present in a particular area within a reasonable time frame."

And Neil says, not surprisingly, "there wasn't anything big, scale or reptilian" found in the Loch Ness samples.

"But we did describe 3000 other species found in that loch," he says.

Gene editing and gene drives

Neil has been outspoken about the potential - and potential risks - of new gene editing techniques made possible by the CRISPR-Cas9 system.

He says gene editing and gene drives offer interesting possibilities to develop new ways of controlling pests. He says it has been developed for use in controlling mosquitoes overseas, but points out it has not yet worked in insects such as wasps, or mammals such as rats.

"I remain optimistic that genetic technologies will remain one of the tools that will help us control these pest species," says Neil, who admits he doesn't know whether it will be an existing technology such as gene editing and gene drives, or new emerging techniques such as the toxin-antitoxin system.

In the meantime, Neil is delighted to have been part of the team that sequenced the genome of the tuatara. This was a complex project involving a very large genome, which is large because it contains many repeat sequences of DNA…

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The 2020 Tahunui-A-Rangi Award goes to David Tipene Leach for the wahakura, a woven bassinet to address the problem of sudden unexpected death in infancy.

Professor David Tipene Leach, from the Eastern Institute of Technology, has won the 2020 Tahunui-a-rangi Award from the Royal Society Te Apārangi .

David led a team which applied mātauranga Māori to create the wahakura, a woven flax bassinet to address the problem of sudden unexpected death in infancy by creating a safe shared sleeping space for babies in their parents' bed.

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Sudden unexpected death in infancy or SUDI affects between 40 to 60 babies under the age of one in New Zealand each year.

Although rates of SUDI, which used to be called cot death or SIDS, have gone down markedly over the past 50 years, they remain significantly higher among Māori infants than non-Māori infants.

The major risk factors for SUDI are infants sleeping on their side or front, shared sleeping - babies with their parents - and parents smoking.

David says that a safe sleep programme encouraging parents to put babies to sleep on their backs significantly lowered the number of SUDI deaths. But by the mid-2000s the death rate had flattened out and David and his colleagues decided they needed to find a new strategy.

"All the messages at the time were safe sleep environments," says David, "so we thought why can you not create a safe sleep environment in a shared bed?"

"We came up with this idea of a woven flax bassinet that was highly portable and could slip in between the parents."

David says that parents loved the concept as it allowed them to safely share their bed with their infant and they liked the traditional concept of a woven flax basket.

Wahakura have been widely adopted in nation-wide Safe Sleep programmes, and led to a 29 percent drop in infant mortality.

Demand outstrips production of the hand-made cradle, and so the wahakura concept has also spawned a more widely available plastic bassinet known as a Pēpi Pod.

Listen to the full interview to hear David talk about the success of the wahakura, and pregnancy clinics where mothers-to-be learn to weave their own wahakura.

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Maria Bargh's work on political economies and the environment is focused on Māori communities and has won her the 2020 Te Puāwaitanga Award.

Interweaving her knowledge of political economy and environmental issues with local Government and Maori communities has won Associate Professor Maria Bargh this year's Te Puāwaitanga Award from the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

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The biannual Te Puāwaitanga Award is made in recognition of research that has made an eminent and distinctive contribution to Te Ao Māori and indigenous knowledge.

The 2020 award has gone to Maria, who is in the Māori Studies Department at Victoria University of Wellington.

The Royal Society Te Apārangi says that Associate Professor Bargh has two interweaving strands of work-political economy and environment-that contribute to self-determination for Māori, build Māori and Indigenous knowledges and practices, and are radically reshaping how Aotearoa New Zealand responds to environmental issues.

She is interested in climate change, biodiversity and renewable energy, both as it affects her own hapu as well as its wider impact on Māori communities.

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Unravelling how genes control colour in petunias has won Nick Albert the 2020 Hamilton Award and could help breed more nutritious fruit.

Understanding how flowers turn colour on and off has won plant geneticist Dr Nick Albert the Hamilton Award, the Royal Society Te Apārangi Early Career Research Excellence Award for Science.

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Nick started his research in a glasshouse with specially bred 'mutant petunias.' He says that the petunias are "really interesting tools to understand how genes work together to turn on the pathway that actually makes the pigments."

Nick says that the colour red evolved quite early on in land plants and it is often associated with stress.

"It behaves as a sort of sunscreen against too much intense light."

Red is also an important signal for animals - including humans - to "say 'eat me - I'm ready' or 'come and pollinate me'."

Red, blue and purple are produced by abundant anthocyanin pigments.

The genetics of colour

Nick says he is fascinated by how one cell gets a message that tells it to be coloured, while the cell next door doesn't get the message.

"It's all genetically controlled and that's really interesting to me," says Nick. "How do you get these ordered patterns out of, essentially, chaos."

He says there are about 20 genes that need to be turned on at the right time to produce colour. "If you don't get them all turned on then you don't get colour."

"But there are other genes, the ones that I'm working on, and they act like a switch and turn that whole pathway on at the right time."

Nick says there might be a further 10 genes involved in the switching task.

Improving fruit

As Nick and his colleagues unpick the genetic secrets of colour in plants, they are beginning to use that information to improve colour in fruits such as apple.

Colour in fruit has health promoting benefits as well as being visually appealing, yet apples, for example, struggle to produce colour in warmer temperatures.

Nick says using genetics can help in breeding programmes to enhance fruit colour under a changing climate.

He also says that understanding colour genes in wild bilberry fruits, which have coloured flesh as well as coloured skin could help in the breeding of blueberries with the same trait…

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NZ's top research award, the Rutherford Medal, has gone to Brian Boyd, whose work spans Shakespeare to Nabokov to Popper, & weaves arts and sciences together.

The 2020 Rutherford Medal has been won by an English professor at the University of Auckland, a polymath whose work has been published world-wide in over 20 languages.

It is the first time a researcher from the humanities has won New Zealand's top research award.

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A fascination with Nabokov

Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd is most well-known for his work on Vladimir Nabokov.

He says his fascination with the Russian-American writer - best known for his novel Lolita - began in his first year at university. "I went on to write my PhD on him, his widow saw it and thought it was the best thing written on him, so she invited me to sort out his archive."

Boyd says that he wrote a biography of Nabokov and initially thought that would be the end of it, but his fascination with the author has continued unabated.

"Since 1993 ... I have to tried to work on things other than Nabokov, but I think I've published or edited another 16 books on him."

"Many people," says Boyd, "think Nabokov was the greatest writer of the 20th century and I do too."

"I think what is unique for me in Nabokov is that he tries to provide the reader with the same excitement of discovery that he felt in his work as a scientist."

Nabokov was a world-leading lepidopterist, studying moths and butterflies.

"You can read and discover new levels in his work - and keep on discovering them," says Boyd, who comments he is still making new discoveries in a work of Nabokov's that he has read about a hundred times.

An admiration for Karl Popper

Professor Boyd says he is also a big admirer of Karl Popper, who many claim was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Popper was living in New Zealand during the Second World War when he wrote his influential book on totalitarianism, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which historian Michael King described as the most influential book to come out of New Zealand.

Popper was also a highly regarded philosopher of science, although Boyd thinks he is undervalued.

"I still think that his reputation is not nearly as high as the quality of the material deserves," says Boyd, who has been working for many years on a biography of Popper.

Evolving stories

Evolution has been a recurring theme of Boyd's work, as it was for both Nabokov and Popper, and he has a body of work relating literature and evolution…

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The 2020 Research Honours go to a Nabokov expert, a Maori political economist & a colourful plant breeder, and students talk climate change.

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A group of Dunedin students talk about what they learned making an Otago Museum exhibition about climate change inequality.

A group of Dunedin students talk about what they learned making an Otago Museum exhibition about climate change inequality.

The exhibition "Climate change - striking a balance' will return to the museum in Dunedin on 16 November 2020 for 2 weeks.

This audio is a cut-down version of a longer podcast that aired on Otago Access Radio (OAR FM) and which is available at this link.

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Deep sea corals are being put to the test at NIWA to find out how they cope with sediment.

Deep sea corals are being put to the test at NIWA to find out how they cope with sediment.

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Think of corals and most of us imagine brightly coloured sunlit tropical reefs. But two thirds of the world's corals live in the deep sea.

That is more than 3300 species of coral that live in complete darkness, in temperatures as cold as minus 1° Celsius.

They can survive at depths of up to six kilometres.

And deep-sea corals are record holders - meet the oldest animals on earth, which can live for more than 4000 years.

And yes, they form reefs, although not quite in the style in the Great Barrier Reef. And these reefs provide important habitat for other marine creatures.

More than 110 deepwater species of coral have been described from the New Zealand region, and they feed on a rain of plankton drifting down from higher up in the water column.

Dr Malcolm Clark, from NIWA, says that on the Chatham Rise, which stretches out from Canterbury towards the Chatham Islands, you can find "quite spectacular reef-type structures" on the top of the rise, at depths of about 300 metres down to 1000 metres. Further down, at abyssal depths of up to three kilometres, you find sparser solitary corals

Living at the bottom of the sea does not mean that deep-sea corals are immune to human impacts. Fisheries trawling has been hugely damaging and in the past few years there have been proposals for deep sea mining and iron sand extraction that could also have an impact.

A team of marine ecologists at NIWA have been trying to gauge how resilient deep-sea coral ecosystems might be to these kinds of disturbance, especially sediment plumes or clouds stirred up by various activities.

"We know pretty well what happens when we put a trawl down," says Malcolm. "The footprint of the trawl damages the animals directly in its path, but it also stirs up this mud, and that spreads over a much wider area."

"The important thing about sediment is that it is like dust in the wind - it spreads out."

"We're talking about quite a wide depth range where human activities or natural events could disturb the seabed and create these clouds of sediment," says Malcolm.

"We think the animals may be less able to cope with disturbance because they're more adapted to a uniform, fairly constant environment."…

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NIWA ecologists have been stress testing deep sea corals to find out they cope with sediment.

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Jocelyn Turnbull from GNS Science is measuring how much CO2 we're producing in NZ towns - and she's doing it by cutting the grass.

Radiocarbon, grass and the 'who farted' problem are all part of a Carbon Watch NZ project measuring how much carbon dioxide is being produced by New Zealand's cars and trucks.

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How to fingerprint how much CO2 is coming from burning fossil fuel

Measuring how much carbon dioxide is in the air is straightforward. Working out how much of that carbon dioxide has come from vehicles is rather more complicated.

"If we just measure carbon dioxide concentrations there's not only emissions from fossil fuel burning, but there's also this natural exchange," says Jocelyn Turnbull, a radiocarbon scientist with GNS Science.

"Photosynthesis, where plants suck carbon dioxide out of the air to grow and respiration, where ... plants breathe carbon dioxide back out into the atmosphere ... So it can be hard to get at exactly how much carbon dioxide is coming from fossil fuel burning."

The way Jocelyn and her colleagues get around this problem is to measure radiocarbon in carbon dioxide.

Because fossil fuel comes from petroleum reserves that are many millions of years old, all of the radiocarbons they contain have already radioactively decayed. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions released by the burning of fossil fuels decrease the relative amounts of radiocarbon in the atmosphere.

The radiocarbon team at GNS Science use this change in the ratio of heavy carbon isotopes to calculate how much carbon dioxide is being released due to the burning of fossil fuels.

The 'who farted' problem

The final step is to calculate where the emission occurred.

Jocelyn describes the process of identifying the source of carbon dioxide emissions as the 'who farted problem'. Was it a small emission nearby, or a large emission from further away?

To work this out they combine the radiocarbon and carbon dioxide data with a weather model to work out where the emissions have come from.

"That's the problem we're trying to solve with these atmospheric transport models," says Jocelyn. "Where did it come from? Who did it? How big was it?"

The grass record

Measuring a sample of air gives you a carbon dioxide level at a single moment in time, whereas plants turn out to be excellent record keepers over longer periods of time…

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