Biotechnology Unit
Malaysia has identified biotechnology as a key driver of growth for its economy. This was formally recognised with the launch of Malaysia’s National Biotechnology Policy in April 2005. With the Ninth Malaysia Plan, Malaysia has set in place a development programme that will ultimately enable Malaysia to become one of the leading players in biotechnology in the Asia Pacific region. Following the country’s strategic policy decision, the Malaysian Rubber Board (MRB) has created a Biotechnology Unit at TARRC in order to complement the efforts of the MRB’s Biotechnology Group to in the improve and better utilise natural rubber as an agricultural and pharmaceutical resource. The new Unit at TARRC will build on advanced biotechnological methodologies, as well as on the advantageous geographical location in close proximity to leading biotechnology centres in Europe. The new Unit is also seen as a potential technical and logistical base for collaborative or service based research on Malaysian commodity crops, like oil palm, cocoa and others.
The establishment of the new Biotechnology Unit within the Material Research and Development Division started at the beginning of 2008 and a small pilot Biotechnology laboratory became fully operational in April this year. In 2009 the Unit will move from its current location to the main laboratory building where it will occupy a space of 275sqm and will be equipped with state-of-art advanced instrumentation to enable the Unit to carry out our its current and future projects.
The spectrum of research projects of the new Unit will be covering areas of genomics and proteomics of natural rubber and other crops important for Malaysia and the types of projects will vary from the basic to the applied.
The initial two research projects in the area of proteomics will be focusing on various aspects of diagnostics for latex allergens, in particular, Hev b 5 and Hev b 13 and on comprehensive characterization of foreign proteins with high industrial importance, like human serum albumin and antibodies against tooth decay, produced by transgenic rubber trees. The latter project was initiated in order to prove the possibility of application of molecular farming concept using rubber trees, as well as trees’ ability to produce foreign proteins suitable for utilization by pharmaceutical industry. The foreign proteins will be extracted from latex of transgenic rubber trees first produced by the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia in 1994 and which have now reached a mature stage in the field.
The Unit’s starting project in genomics of natural rubber is aiming towards development of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers for Hevea brasiliensis. SNP’s are the most frequent type and rich source of variation found in DNA to date. SNP’s can therefore be used to saturate genetic maps and are also potentially useful for association mapping of interesting traits. SNP’s show several advantages over other marker types such as their high frequency and ease of a range of automated processes. To date, there are no publicly available SNP markers for Hevea brasiliensis. The TARRC Biotechnology Unit will be looking at opportunities to advance this work by joining its efforts with number of research groups worldwide that are currently involved in molecular marker development for these species.A list of TARRC staff can be found in Organisation structure.