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Rebuilding the reef
Alex: [00:00:02] Hi, everyone, and welcome to Science in Focus, a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. My name is Dr. Alex Thompson. I'm an industry engagement manager here at UTS in the Climate Change Cluster Research Institute, and I myself am actually a marine ecologist. I'll be the moderator for today's event, collating all the questions and asking our speaker these questions at the end of the talk. So coral reefs are synonymous with the Australian marine environment and a source of inspiration to many. They are diverse ecosystems, bursting with life, bringing enormous value to communities and the broader environment through the ecosystem services they provide. And I've heard many marine scientists refer to them as real life magic. In the past decades, we've seen a monumental shift in the impact to global coral reefs through climate change and other impacts. But there are a group of scientists here at UTS who are working to investigate and implement innovative techniques to restore and rehabilitate reefs both in Australia and across the world. Our speaker today is one of those researchers involved in global coral reef restoration, and this talk today builds on a Science in Focus from 2021. And today we'll hear about the updates to the research efforts on the Great Barrier Reef. Before I introduce our speaker for today, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands and extend that acknowledgement to all the lands that our audience is joining from today. I'd also like to pay respect to the elders, both past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land.
Alex: [00:01:35] So Professor Dave Suggett, who will be speaking today, is a marine ecologist and leader of the Future Reefs Program within the University of Technology Sydney's climate change cluster. His research over the last 20 years has been to understand how changing environments affect coral growth and survival through development of novel techniques to unlock coral functional biology from genes all the way up to ecosystems. Dave’s work has examined reefs across the world, but has intensively focused on the Australian Great Barrier Reef for the last eight years to understand the limits for coral survival under climate change. This led to founding and leading a world first partnership between tourism research, a program called the Coral Nurture Program to implement new tourism-led coral propagation reef maintenance and rehabilitation approaches. He chairs the International Coral Reef Restoration Consortium, field based Coral Propagation Working Group and is currently the Vice president of the Australian Coral Reef Society. So Dave, I'd like to introduce you today.
Dave: [00:02:34] Hello there.
Alex: [00:02:35] Hi, Dave. I'm going to let you share your slides.
Dave: [00:02:38] Okay. Thank you very much, Alex. So thanks again, everyone, for joining today. And a huge thanks to Alex for the really generous introduction to what we'll be covering today. As Alex said, I lead a program here. I also lead the Coral Nurture Program, which is what we're going to be presenting. And I really want to acknowledge the other co-founders of the program. I see this presentation as really a sort of shared vision that we all have. I particularly also want to pay my deepest respects and acknowledge the traditional elders, past, present and emerging beyond Alex's acknowledgment to all of those custodians, the traditional custodians of knowledge of all the land and sea countries that were really fortunate to operate. And this is a Great Barrier Reef wide program now. And so we have a very heavy footprint throughout many, many countries. We also partner with a huge range of tourism partners, as you'll see, as we unpack this a little bit further, and I've put some of the key names of those involved significantly in the program, either through our core management research, but also operational practice. Without all of these individuals, we really wouldn't have built the scale and the impact that we've been really fortunate to achieve. And of course, all of our funders that similarly have been very generous, enabling us to reach some really ambitious goals over the past few years.
Dave: [00:04:00] But what I'm going to talk about is really where we're at one year on, and I'm hoping many of you joined us 12 months ago to really hear the state of play with which the Coral Nurture Program was evolving as a really significant development in terms of a new stewardship model for the Great Barrier Reef that revolves around propagating and replanting coral to augment natural recovery. It is a historical turning point for reef management, not just in Australia but worldwide. Historically, we've rested on very much passive protection measures, but also acts of mitigation to reduce our stress impacts, certainly not aggressively enough in the case of climate change. And we now realise that of course, that those measures are simply not enough. There's now 1 billion people estimated on planet Earth relying on healthy reefs for survivorship or economies, and quite simply, those stakeholders do not have time for us to reach the really clear goals that we need in terms of mitigating climate change. So we need new solutions in the short term to ensure we have reefs to save. And that is really the goal of a lot of these new active intervention measures that are in play.
Dave: [00:05:12] Australia is pretty new to this and when we look back, probably only five years ago was when we started having the first conversations about should we introduce new management, active management approaches that revolve around more aggressive interventions and fast forwarding to now, this is an array of some of the examples that we have in play and the middle top and the top right images are really from the Coral Nurure Program. But through our work at UTS, within the Future Reefs Program, we've also integrated into a wide range of other types of intervention through research and development, spanning in the top left reef stabilisation and the bottom right, looking to augment sexual reproduction of corals and how they can better survive on reefs. But really our story starts with the main stakeholders of the Great Barrier Reef, the tourism industry. So when we think about the Great Barrier Reef in terms of its economic value and of course there's many values we can consider, whether it's biodiversity or traditional knowledge, it's really the tourism value that carries the dollar value that is quite often talked about through the media in terms of the reef value. And there's maps available demonstrating where the visitation rates are and consequently where the heaviest footprints are. And this is important for lots of reasons. It tells us where the economy is concentrated. But what happened in 2016, 2017, when we had the very first catastrophic impacts through mass coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef, and we've had many since, many of these stakeholders, the livelihoods were really threatened overnight. And the reason is quite simple. Many of the tourism operators on the Great Barrier Reef have fixed moorings, which means there's of course real importance to preserve, retain and rebuild the sites where those moorings are at. They're very high value sites. They represent only 7% of all sites of all reefs on the Great Barrier Reef. And where we came into this was through a series of conversations with the tourism industry, was recognising a real hunger for the industry to be equipped with more active measures to aid, restoring or rebuilding or regenerating some of the site health post the mass bleaching event. Waiting for natural recovery alone was simply not sufficient. In the past, these tourism operators have had capacity to intervene through removal of aggressive predators such as crown of thorns starfish and of course, highly motivated to conduct green tourism through sustainable measures as best they can. But having the means to actively contribute to regeneration of degraded areas was seen as a real motivational factor moving forward, not only to retain livelihoods and retain the quality of the sites, but really to help contribute to fast recovery rates that were needed in the face of potentially repeat bleaching events. So we developed a new program in partnership with the tourism industry. Really, and a simple model. The model is the operators themselves conduct propagation and planting activities at scale as a network at those sites, and us as UTS researchers, we are here to provide the science to validate and provide credibility to those activities.
Dave: [00:08:40] So in other words, if the operators are able to claim that they've planted 1000 corals, we can assess how effective that's been and subsequently what is the return on investment. And actually, are those efforts indeed feasible and worth it? That's a really important part that we play. And in order to undertake this as a network, we developed collectively a code of operation. This was incredibly important in terms of retaining trust across the partnerships. This is just a small snapshot of some of the key features of our code of operation, but it really was about focusing on being in line with the World Heritage values, of course, contributing to retaining the tourism industry and the tourism economy and ensuring some social resilience, but really ensuring that this was credible, meaningful and worthwhile.
Dave: [00:09:32] So we presented a lot of this last year in terms of the nuts and bolts of the program. So I'm not going to take the time to do too much of that now. But fair to say, we use a lot of really sophisticated but low tech solutions to be able to do this at scale. We're one of few programs worldwide, and I'll talk about that a little later on that has actually started to really have gains at scales that weren't really considered feasible if you just rewind a few years ago. And these statistics here are taken directly from our Coral Nurture Program website and really convey the footprint we currently operate at.
Dave: [00:10:05] And I won't read these out. You can obviously see these for yourselves, but importantly, the stats and the numbers should hopefully speak for themselves. They are in the tens of thousands in terms of the scale of replanting. Huge number of staff and volunteer hours contribute to this and we're increasing the diversity of corals that are propagate and replanted all the time as we learn more in terms of how to do things better and more effectively and certainly contributing to much more rigorous and accurate ecological values. And if we look at this sort of development over time, and I've shown here the previous, where we were at 12 months ago is in blue, and I'm not going to repeat some of that now, but you can see that we've been through various phases as a program, as we've learnt how to do things and we've developed networks and we've built scale. The area on the red on the right hand side is really where we've been in the last 12 months. We've continued planting at pretty much the same sort of volume as we have throughout other phases. But the important point here is that although we use our plant number as a measure of our activity, it isn't a measure of our success. And those are two important things to distinguish with restoration programs. And I'm going to unpack a little bit more what I mean by that. Those numbers are impressive nonetheless, but I want you to be able to look beyond those numbers.
Dave: [00:11:30] When we really think about the reef, we actually have quite a hard time demonstrating the impact we've had. And the reason for that is the sorts of tools and technologies that have been developed with our planting approaches were deliberately designed to be non-invasive and retain the aesthetics of the sites. These are tourism sites and the important thing is that we didn't want it to look like a construction site. And so what you can see here are various examples of reefs that have been repopulated through the coral propagation. This is probably all about 1 to 2 years old, everything that you're seeing here. And when you take visitors to the reef and I was fortunate enough to do this just earlier this week, it's actually really hard demonstrating what impact you've had in terms of the actual replanting and regeneration process other than asking the visitors to cast their minds back maybe a year ago and imagine, all of this was bare reef. So the visual impact alone is incredibly important. But that's again, just one measure of our success, if you like, in terms of how we operate. What's been critical for us in the last 12 months and part of the reason why our planting numbers have been steady but not necessarily spectacular compared to some of the other phases is we've really been thinking about how do we advance what we do in terms of the effectiveness and scale. That's always a key consideration for us in terms of feasibility and effectiveness and operating as a network. And 12 months ago, this is where we were at. We were operating in the Cairns Port Douglas region. The little markers in yellow are our key sites. The little markers in blue are ones we're looking to expand into through the same operations. But in August this year, we actually launched our activity into the Whitsundays as well. That's the second major reef tourism hub for the Great Barrier Reef. The Whitsundays has a lot of different challenges compared to the Cairns Port Douglas in the far north. The Whitsundays was devastated by the series of cyclones, but most recently Cyclone Debbie in 2017. And that really created a very flat reef and a highly turbid reef with lots of sediment reef suspension and this has caused real challenges for us in thinking how do we apply our model to this new area?
Dave: [00:13:47] So as I said, we launched the program this year and the key questions were rather than can we just expand the network and plant lots of coral, it was really thinking, how do we take our approach, our workflows and our technologies and tailor them to even more challenging initial reef environments that have been hit by unprecedented impacts? And these are just some of the pictures, as you can see on the screen here. It's a beautiful place to work. We've really changed, for example, from floating nurseries to table nurseries. We actually now have changed planting coral from laying them flat on the reef to really standing them upright. Now, all of these workflows take a little bit longer than usual. So arguably our return on investment or effectiveness is perhaps a little bit cost effectiveness is perhaps a little bit lower. But the important thing with this project, it's about learning how to do things effectively. And so we're looking here at quality over quantity without question.
Dave: [00:14:48] The other part of advancing our network over the past 12 months or so has been thinking about the global footprint that we have somewhat unexpectedly materialised and the little device that we use, the cheap, low cost device that's used to reattach coral non-invasively has now been distributed to 19 countries worldwide, largely through trials. And this has made us realise that we've had a huge footprint in terms of exporting this Australian-led technology all around the world where there's huge interest amongst stakeholders to similarly adopt these these sorts of workflows and technologies. The other major win for us in terms of advancing our network and this again is through the Coral Clip technology has been integration into the Reef Joint Field Management Program. This is a program that's run through the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and it really is, if you can imagine, a sort of taskforce that's aimed as a first responder to the reef. So if there's a ship grounding or a storm, the field management program will come in and try and actively manage that site in real time and ensure that the right actions are taken. And Coral Clip has now been integrated into that program officially and we're currently developing how that will look into the future. So, the sorts of practices that started through a stakeholder-led vision in partnership with us here at UTS and the research has now had both a national and a global footprint that's been extremely exciting in seeing how some of these concepts have really captured the attention of others.
Dave: [00:16:23] One of the most exciting steps for us this year was attending the International Coral Restoration Conference. There's only been one held before and this was the Reef Restoration Conference was held in Key Largo. We actually had to deal with Hurricane Ian halfway through, which was a challenge in itself. But one of the exciting features of this event was the Coral Nurture Program had the opportunity to actively exchange ideas with the three other largest restoration programs in the world. So between the four of us, it was quite a unique opportunity to start testing how all our different methods into compare and where they might be best suited in different circumstances. It was a really unique event and one that has actually built long lasting relationships that we're looking to build into the future. The bottom right hand side is just an example of the sort of propagation that is undertaken in the Florida area, throughout the Caribbean, actually using these sorts of coral trees. And it's actually quite amazing when you dive through these coral trees, they are really like plantations. They're in their hundreds, some of these coral trees and they retain tens of thousands of coral at once. And it was really exciting to see the sort of scale that the the US partners were having to deal with. They have different sets of challenges, again, fewer species, but actually much more challenging environments than some of ours, believe it or not.
Dave: [00:17:52] And within that framework of building our practice on the reef and expanding our activity has of course been the role of our research. As I said, the Coral Nurture program itself is a unique partnership between tourism and research. That works synergistically. It actually acts as a positive feedback loop so that the more we learn in terms of how to do things bigger and better, the more the tourism operators are able to plant. And of course, the more information we get to be able to refine our research questions to do things bigger and better. So because of that, we've been advancing our science portfolio and it now really spans a huge range of activities and those are all listed here spanning everything from coral attachment biology all the way through to the socio economic impacts. And one of the things I'd like to do for the next few minutes is just share some examples of that science that we've really championed over the past 12 months and how it feeds through to inform our better practice.
Dave: [00:18:52] So the first example is, as you can see here, this is work championed by one of our PhD students, Isabelle. And what we've known for the last few years now is that our corals grow in our nurseries almost ten times faster than they do on the reef. And there's lots of reasons why that is, and I'm not going to go into those now. One of our concerns was just producing coral faster, make them of less quality? And what I mean by that is do they carry less resources for the things that would feed on them on the reef? And also, as they calcify and form a skeleton, that skeleton is critical to dissipate wave action and the role of reefs in coastal protection. But if we're growing corals faster and they're weaker, then they actually could have really low value in replanting them on the reef. So we were very concerned with these particular questions. So Isabelle conducted a 12 month study and really looked at lots and lots of fitness metrics of all of the corals on the nurseries compared to the reef. And what Isabelle was able to demonstrate was that the faster growing corals actually were as robust and as high quality as those on the reef. And in fact, in terms of some of the quality of material as a food source, arguably they were better. So this has been very exciting development showing that we can grow corals faster and that they're the same quality as corals that we grow on the reef.
Dave: [00:20:19] The second example has been really thinking about corals microbiomes. And this was another factor really that we were concerned with, I guess, where we were growing corals in nurseries. We have 120 nurseries now and really we're propagating corals at near agricultural scales. And of course, one of the big things you have to worry about in agriculture is pests and disease. Once you start thinking about monocultures especially, and many of our nurseries have restricted numbers of species on them. So one of the key questions that one of our other PhD students, Paige Strudwick, asked was do the microbiomes, the bacterial communities within our nursery corals, start to show signs of perhaps less desirable bacterial communities? And similarly, when we put them back on the reef, are we propagating some of those bacterial communities? And what Paige demonstrated was actually in the nurseries, the slightly different environments that the nurseries are in compared to the reef, actually nurture a very specific type of bacteria in some coral species community, I should say. And when we replant those corals back on the reef, they actually revert back very quickly to having the same bacterial communities on the reef. So actually what we've demonstrated is the microbiomes are very plastic and we believe that that plasticity is important in similarly aiding really, really healthy nursery growth and similar to the points we made in the previous slide.
Dave: [00:21:50] Some of the more ecological work that we've been involved with, and this is literally being published today, is one of our other PhD student, Christine Roper, was working on some very cool work demonstrating how planting small fragments tips the size frequency distribution of our populations. Now what I mean by that is when you look at a reef, there's always a certain number of small corals and a certain number of large corals, and that's really critical to the ecological balance of the reef in terms of how biomass and diversity is retained. One of the concerns we had through mass bleaching was that, of course once you die, once the large corals and adult corals die, they can't sexually reproduce. So what we call recruitment onto the reef has stalled. And that's a real worry because it means it's very hard to regain your large corals quickly. And that's why we use our asexual propagation practices with small fragments to overcome that bottleneck. And this is really what Christine's paper was able to demonstrate, that by planting lots of small fragments quickly, we can overcome this recruitment bottleneck and fast track recovery back to a reproductively viable population. The figure on the left hand side is actually some of the very first corals we planted as just single little fragments in 2019. They reproduce, they sexually reproduced for the first time last year, and that was that was a world first for us in demonstrating that the material we're repopulating back onto the reef is growing to the point at which it can self recover. And that's absolutely fantastic news. And again, earlier this week we checked these same colonies and they're ready to spawn again next week. So we're very excited to see a second generation of new recruits come through.
Dave: [00:23:38] And with that, that's everything I have to present to you today. I think I'm bang on my time, at least I hope I am. And at this point in time, I'd really like to welcome any questions. I hope it's stimulated lots of thoughts and lots of ideas going forward. And thank you once again for joining me on this very brief journey that we've had over the past 12 months. So thank you.
Alex: [00:23:58] Thank you, Dave. That was a fantastic presentation. So we had quite a few questions come through the Q&A. So I will try and get through as many as I can in the time that we've got. We've got quite a bit of time. I'm just going to pop these up. We've got a few, so I've got a couple of ones that have been uploaded, so I might start with those first, if that's okay.
Dave: [00:24:20] Course.
Alex: [00:24:22] So we've got a question here. What proportion of the Great Barrier Reef has been replanted with new coral?
Dave: [00:24:28] It's a great question, isn't it? Well, the proportion of the reef, it's sort of hard to say. It's a very small proportion. Part of the reason for that as well is that this is not a commercial activity at the moment. It is a research activity. We're still learning how can we do this effectively. That's the critical thing to realise. So with that in mind, the Coral Nurture Program focuses on 30 sites. And remember, tourism sites themselves only reflect 7% of all Great Barrier Reef sites. So it's an extremely small proportion and a small amount. But the goal is again is this is never intended to be deployed across the whole Great Barrier Reef. It's designed to be effective at strategic sites that have disproportionately high value. Now I've mentioned here tourism value, but when we think about high value sites, it may also be, for example, reefs that are positioned oceanographically to supply other reefs with larvae. So there's also sort of ecological values we can be strategic with. So at the moment, reef restoration itself is not conducted at many sites, but where it is conducted it is proven to be extremely effective to augment natural recovery.
Alex: [00:25:38] Fantastic. Thank you. So I might just flick now to some of the questions that were submitted ahead of time, just so I can get a bit of a mix. So we had a question that was submitted ahead. What does the future of coral research look like to you?
Dave: [00:25:54] That's a really interesting question. So, I think it's... Research in general recently has really reflected the shifting needle of management. I would say. So, although an example would be within future reason, within coronation programme, much of our research now is very much applied, so it's led by questions directly needing answers from our stakeholder partners within the Coral Nurture Program. However, that doesn't change any of the science we do. In fact, we still do exactly the same science. It's just that how we ask the questions has changed, has a much more applied sense, and I suspect that that is the future for research in general for coral reefs. Many researchers are still doing their core research, but it's embedded within these much more applied programs and importantly programs that are co-designed with the stakeholders. I think that's the other thing to remember is although as scientists we have what we believe are very good ideas, they're not always the ideas that are needed on the ground right now. Sometimes we're ahead of our time. So I think those sort of co-design research with stakeholders and the applied nature with which we conduct research is obviously becoming more common. Certainly funding landscapes are looking towards those sort of co-designed and stakeholder led applications as well. So the future of research is, I would say, evolving. But to be honest, we're not really doing anything we've ever not done before. And if anything, we're seeing that we're seeing the direct applications. It's extremely exciting and empowering as a scientist to see the impact in real time or near real time of the sort of science you're able to conduct. And I think that's true of many of our students in our group, for example, who have joined partly because, again, through even a PhD program, you can see the impact you're having almost immediately. It's extremely rewarding.
Alex: [00:28:04] All right. We have another question submitted. They want to know how does the Coral Clip actually work?
Dave: [00:28:12] I realised I glossed over this. It's a great question because we sort of described it last year a little bit. And I didn't have time to talk about it. But it's a small spring clip. And the way it works, I have a video, but I'm not going to dig it out now, unfortunately. But you simply hold the clip on one end. You hammer in... It's amazing how many people you learn don't know how to use a hammer, by the way, when you teach how to play with the Coral Clip. You hammer in the nail into the substrate and then you simply use the spring clip to wedge your coral fragment underneath it. And the reason that's important, the reason we designed that, is because the other way you can reattach corals onto a reef is using chemicals, glues and cements. And there's two problems with that. The first with chemicals is that you don't want to be pumping lots of chemicals on a reef. The second is within the tourism industry, there were some really hard health and safety walls of having chemicals on a boat with tourists. Much of our Coral Nurture Program activities integrate into the daily tourism operations. It's one of the reasons we're so cost effective. So we needed a sort of a non chemical based solution. So John Edmondson actually invented the Coral Clip. We're on, I think version six now. It's gone through various iterations. It costs about ten cents. So again, it's extremely accessible and it's why we've sent so many to our overseas partners are largely low to middle economy countries that are looking for low cost solutions. So the coral clip has been useful. Now, the question we always get in relation to that is what does the Coral clip sort of have a lasting impact as a foreign object on the reef? And the answer we like to say is, is no. It is a metal, so it corrodes over time. In fact, if you if you find an old coral clip with, say, for example, the corals died or fallen out, which occasionally happens, you can feel that the thin arm of the coral clip has become extremely brittle. So it naturally corrodes over time or is overgrown and engulfed by the coral. The little metal nail has a longer lasting legacy because it's embedded within the reef and it's slightly less biological and sort of the chemistry is different within the reef substrate. So that's why we're able to use the metal detector to find the nails and not the clips. What we've learnt recently, and it's a hypothesis we're working on related to this, is that certain metals we believe may actually aid coral survival. And so there's a prevailing hypothesis certain metals are needed for not just corals, but other organisms to build stress tolerance molecules within their metabolic machinery. And one of the questions we're testing now is whether the the additional metal that's provided through Coral Clip might actually be a benefit in providing some additional stress tolerance. So it's 'watch this space' time. It's part of our sort of wider research portfolio as well.
Alex: [00:31:16] Great. Thank you. It's got another question. How do you encourage or can you indeed encourage artificial spawning or foster coral growth?
Dave: [00:31:26] Really a good way to start with that. I'll try not to make this too long an answer because it can probably be a very long answer, but some I'll start off with the first part. So can you encourage corals to spawn? Some very cool research has now actually developed into a spin off company in the UK, and what these researchers were able to do was by fine tuning over an annual cycle the lighting, you can actually shift the timing of spawning. So they've had, for example, Great Barrier Reef corals in London and got them to spawn at different times of year. And so now what this company is able to do is say have 12 tanks. Each tank is set up to spawn in a different month. And so theoretically you can produce larvae, you can get corals to sexually reproduce year round. So it's a really, really exciting development thinking about how do we better promote the sexual reproduction phase for restoration activities. So there's a lot of work in that space all around the world, but primarily there's some, for example, with aims, there's some in other countries where they're now trialling these systems to promote more reproduction over time. Obviously you can't really get the same coral to spawn multiple times throughout the year because it is an energetic cost to the coral. So obviously it's a stress. So one thing you're very mindful of is that although you want multiple spawns, you don't want more from the same coral, hence multiple times.
Dave: [00:32:57] The other thing that was asked was can you encourage coral to grow faster? On the reef, that's a really challenging question because the coral is subjected to a series of predators. There's lots and lots of grazers around. However, what we discovered in the nurseries, I mentioned that we were able to grow them ten times faster on the reef. That's primarily because the little corallivores are not brave enough to venture out from the reef on to our nurseries. The second is that the higher flow rates that the coral nurseries sit in just adjacent to the reef seem to provide the corals with more opportunity to feed. So we we often see, in fact this is very common, that the coral polyps are extended on the coral nurseries during the daytime. That's really unusual on the reef because of course coral predators are looking to snip off and eat those little polyps that are extended. Of course, again, on the nursery, those predators are not there or are not there as high abundance. So the corals are able to actively feed during the day. There's other factors, sort of physical factors that also age that faster growth on the nurseries. But as I said, by being able to use nurseries not only to rebuild biomass quickly, but do so, generating material quality has been a real game changer for us, and especially for the operator partners who are now replanting at such scales that the access to material actually starts to become the bottleneck very quickly.
Alex: [00:34:28] Great. Thanks, Dave. We have quite a few questions coming in about some of the different environmental and anthropogenic impacts that are, I guess, affecting corals. So people wanting to know things about are microplastics or microscopic plastics damaging to corals? Is temperature the biggest thing that's likely to impact corals? And what are the types of things that can be done to help mitigate some of those really big environmental and other stresses?
Dave: [00:34:59] Yeah, that's a big subject. That's a great question, really. The, you know, the biggest factor we have to deal with, of course, is climate emission, climate gas emissions. Ocean, I should say global warming for, using the generic term, is really, really problematic for reefs. Many of you will know all about this, but the process of having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or more methane or other gases is threefold for coral reefs. The first is a process called ocean warming. The second is a process called ocean acidification. The last is a process called ocean deoxygenation. So all of those act together. And in fact, ocean warming itself is perhaps the biggest of the three because it does two things. The first is it really is the key driver of why we're seeing coral mortality at scale through mass bleaching and anomalously warm conditions. And as an example, this year we had the first bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef during a La Nina year where it's supposed to be cooler than average, but yet the waters were still anomalously warm. The other thing ocean warming does is that it also amplifies ocean deoxygenation. As you can imagine, warmer oceans are able to hold less gas. Oxygen is a critical gas for survival, as you might imagine, for any organism, any aerobic organism. It's why oxygen therapy is used in medicine, for example, to aid recovery post-surgeries. So ocean warming itself amplifies all these other stressors. So it is our biggest concern and being able to mitigate that is our absolute priority if we are to have reefs into the future.
Dave: [00:36:46] The other thing, of course, is all stressors that act synergistically or interactively. And so whether it's local pollution, spanning microplastics or herbicides, pesticides, oil, coal, runoff, you name it, all of those have an impact. Probably one of the and I'm not going to say too much about this, but one of the perhaps most controversial out there is sunscreen. There's a lot of lobbying to, for example, produce reef-friendly sunscreens, which is great. Any less chemical on the reef is important, but the scientific evidence for sunscreens' impact on corals is still, the jury is still very much out. In fact, there's very little evidence at play at the moment. And that's something to be extremely mindful of when you're making your choices to visit the reef. We always use reef friendly sunscreen because we feel it's the right thing to do to have less chemicals. But also you need to do your homework in terms of the real effect it's having. The other question really pointed to microplastics, and there's growing evidence demonstrating that corals and other organisms actually bioaccumulate microplastics into both tissues and skeletons. The cost this has on corals is still a little bit unknown. But the way I look at this and I think other researchers are probably really pursuing this much more actively than I am. And Jen Mathews actually here at UTS has done quite a bit of work on plastics and microplastics, has again, any sort of foreign body or stressor comes with an added energetic cost for coral and any energetic cost comes with the penalty of being able to not resist other stressors that it has to deal with.
Dave: [00:38:30] So the more we can mitigate anything, the better. And I know we focus on climate change mitigation as the key stressor because we should. We have to. We also need to be mindful that any other stressor amplifies on the reef. So any action we take is absolutely critical, whether it is reduce straws or reduce plastics, use reef friendly sunscreen, restore reefs. All of it has a role to play in ensuring we're minimising our stress impacts. And of course that is more evident than ever as we have such a large footprint on the reef. What was really mind blowing this year was the paper that was produced that demonstrated we now have a billion dependent humans on earth relying on healthy reefs for their survival. We used to use the statistic half a million for the last ten years. A new census demonstrated that was vastly underestimated. So pretty much. One in seven people on the planet rely on a healthy reef to survive. And at the moment we need to do everything we can to ensure we have reefs into the future for that survival. And in many cases, many communities do not have time for us to solve climate change at the rate that our politicians and governance is able to commit to.
Alex: [00:39:52] I'm conscious of time and there's quite a few questions coming through, so we might do a bit of a quick-fire round.
Dave: [00:39:58] I like it. Okay, I'll keep it short and sweet.
Alex: [00:40:01] Okay, so there's lots of correlated questions. So really quickly, how many types of coral are there?
Dave: [00:40:09] Upwards of 650 for the Great Barrier Reef. Used to be 650 species, but new molecular tools demonstrate that that's probably underestimated by a factor of one or two.
Alex: [00:40:20] And who knows what mutants are out there?
Dave: [00:40:22] Who knows what mutants are out there? So it's cool. New science that we have going on in our group is finding new species.
Alex: [00:40:30] Awesome. What is your favourite type of coral?
Dave: [00:40:33] One that is alive!
Alex: [00:40:35] Lots of people wanting to know how to get involved. So if there was one thing that people could do walking away today to help the reef and reef restoration, what would it be?
Dave: [00:40:44] Please visit the reef. I think the critical thing is go and see how fantastic the reef is and by going to see the reef with the operator partners within the Coral Nurture program, of course you are contributing to how they can better steward the reef site. So that's of course one option. The other option is do everything you can to lower your emissions, lower your stress footprints onto the reef.
Alex: [00:41:06] If someone wanted to study the reef, get involved from a studying or job perspective, what would you recommend that they do?
Dave: [00:41:13] I would recommend get involved in being a part of current reef activities any way you can, whether that's through volunteering for reef-relevant activities or getting some work experience within some of the reef industries. Pretty much reef science spans everything from biological engineering to social science. So whatever science you decide to do, there's a role for it within improving the health of our reefs.
Alex: [00:41:35] Great. If people wanted to get involved and volunteer, is there something else they could do as well?
Dave: [00:41:42] Unfortunately, at the moment we're in a bit of a ... Sorry, this is where I get a bit of a long answer. The answer is it's difficult to actively volunteer within the Coral Nurture Program at the moment because it's set up as a research permit. But we are working with the authorities to transition it into a different type of permit where volunteers can can contribute.
Alex: [00:42:01] So watch this space, but in the meantime, go and visit the reef and see as much as you can.
Dave: [00:42:05] Absolutely. Absolutely. Please, please be involved.
Alex: [00:42:06] We have two more questions that came through. I'll end on that one as the last one. So we've got opportunities for people, things they can do. I should just end with this last question because I think it's a great one to finish with. So there was a science teacher that submitted a question that they're very hopeful for the impact that the next generation of students, young people, next generation scientists can have on coral reefs. What is the thing that you are most optimistic about for the future?
Dave: [00:42:42] I'm definitely most optimistic in that everyone I'm seeing coming through of a certain generation really wants to be more actively involved. I think in the past we believe that solving the problems of our reef were lobbying for climate change, which itself is an active process, but being actually able to get involved and actively contribute to reef recovery and management is really, really important part of it. And I'm optimistic because we're seeing that these are having a real effect. It's not something that we are just throwing around as a bandaid or an option. It really is something that has both an ecological impact but also a social impact as well.
Alex: [00:43:24] Fantastic. So in any way, shape or form that people can get involved, it really does have an impact.
Dave: [00:43:29] It really does. You should be optimistic that if you do something, it is helping.
Alex: [00:43:35] Amazing. That's, I think, a perfect note to end on, Dave. So thank you so much for the lively and informative panel discussion today. Thank you to everyone who attended and submitted questions. One last thing, Dave. If people want to visit and know updates about the research from Coral Nurture or from yourself, where can they find you? Where can they find that information?
Dave: [00:43:52] Yeah, the best place, we update the website monthly, so please go to the Coral Nurture Program website if it's something you specifically want to see about Coral Nurture Program activity, but otherwise don't hesitate to follow us on Twitter. Email us if you have specific questions about either this program or the wider research within Future Reefs.
Alex: [00:44:10] Fantastic. We'll send a copy of today's talk along with this Q&A to everyone who registered and it will be on our website very soon. Thank you again for all attending. We hope you are leaving inspired and feel like you can make a big impact on the coral reef. Thanks, Dave.
Dave: [00:44:24] Thanks, Alex, and thanks everyone for coming on today.
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Jen: Welcome to UTS Science in Focus, a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. I'm Dr. Jen Matthews, a marine biochemist and coral reef researcher here at UTS, and I'll be moderating for today's event. So I'll be collating your questions and asking our speaker these questions at the end of the talk. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands. I would also like to pay my respects to the elders past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land. As coral reefs are the focus of today's talk, I would also like to acknowledge the continuing sea country management and custodianship of reefs across Australia, including the Great Barrier Reef by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditional owners whose rich cultures, heritage, values, enduring connections and shared efforts help to protect the future of the reefs for future generations.
Jen: So just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. So with this being an online event, do bear with us. If there are any technical issues, we will work quickly to resolve them. And if you find that you're not able to access the talk at any point, please log out and log back in again, as that usually resolve these issues. If you have any questions during today's webinar, please type them in the Q&A box in your Zoom control panel, and we'll do our best to answer the questions along the way. If you like a question that someone else has asked and you would like it answered then you can use the upvoting tool, which is just the thumbs up next to the question itself. So the session will be recorded, but we will not be recording any video or audio input from the audience. You may contact UTS at Science.Future@uts.edu.au to discuss any concerns you may have.
Jen: So today you're going to be hearing from Dr. Emma Camp, a marine biologist and the deputy team leader of the Future Reefs team here at UTS. Emma is an award winning researcher, including 2020 Time magazine Next Generation Leader and was recently named the winner of the Macquarie University Eureka Prize for Outstanding Early Career Researcher. Emma researches and advocates for the world's marine life under threat from environmental and climate change. She is one of the founders of the Coral Nurture Program on the Great Barrier Reef, a unique program involving scientists and tour operators to enhance research, biodiversity and promote site stewardship. Emma is an advocate for women in STEM and improve climate action. So to get you in the mood for Emma's talk, I would first like to take you on a virtual dive into the importance of coral reefs.
Jen: So more than 70% of our world is ocean. And while corals occupy less than 1% of that, they are exceptionally valuable. They provide food, livelihoods and economic opportunity to more than half a billion people in over 100 countries. They provide coastal protection from increasing extreme weather events and have been the source of novel medicines, including treatments for Alzheimer's and cancer. And they are teeming with life, hosting a quarter of all known marine species. Corals are living organisms and the foundational builders of reef. And just like every living organism on this planet, they need a healthy environment to survive and thrive. But the ocean and climate change are inextricably linked, and climate change is increasingly altering the ocean's chemistry, rising sea levels, warming ocean temperatures, shifting currents and increasing weather volatility, all of which affect coral reefs. And very quickly, our reefs can change from productive, thriving underwater cities to desolate waterscapes, absent of corals, fish and all the ecosystem services they previously had to offer. In fact, 14% of the world's reefs have been lost in the last decade. And if we continue to allow extreme changes in our environment without action, coral reefs may not survive the century, and the survival of our planet depends on healthy coral reefs. And this is why the research, dedication and action by pioneering researchers like Dr. Emma Camp is critical for the future of our reefs. And it's my absolute pleasure to introduce Emma, who is going to lead us down an exciting path of how corals that are already living in extreme conditions offer natural laboratories, helping her to design conservation strategies to help safeguard the world's reefs.
Emma: Thank you, Jen. Thank you, Jen, for that gracious introduction and for telling us about the value of the reefs and the state of the reefs. And what I would say is that this brings us to a pivotal point in time where we need change. And this has really been kind of cultivated in the fact that it's the ecosystem decade of restoration. The United Nations have also made it the decade of ocean sustainability. So collectively, we're realising that the state of the environment needs change, particularly the oceans. But how do we achieve that and how do extreme environments contribute to that need for change? And that's what I really want to talk to you about today. So globally, we are seeing that our reefs are on this downward trajectory. They are at some starting point, which varies depending on location, habitats, and even within a reef we see a lot of variability. But concerningly around the world, we're on this downward trajectory. For those of you that have been paying attention to the news recently, you would have seen in the last few days that Australia stated the Environment Report came out and what this highlighted is that here in Australia all of the environment is being impacted by climate change. We saw that marine life as a whole was classified as good but degrading and under increasing threat. But importantly, within the marine category, coral reefs were singled out as being poor and degrading. And so this is really a concern not just for us as scientists, but for all of the people that fundamentally rely on the services that coral reefs provide.
Emma: So the question then is how do we get to a point where we can change? How can we either reduce the rate at which we're seeing this decline? Or more importantly, how do we actually change that trajectory? How do we start to improve coral cover, improve diversity, and ultimately ensure that the services that the reefs provide that are so valuable to people around the world continue into the future. And this is a challenge that we are currently faced with. So I'm going to talk through three ways that I think this change can be achieved and then talk about how extreme environments feed into these three headings. So the first is that we fundamentally have to address climate change. We need to come together. We need collective targeted action to ensure that we address the root cause of climate change. And without that, any other actions are going to be futile and short lived. Now other actions that we can take is traditional marine protection. So these are things like marine parks that are vitally important to ensure that the resources that are there are being protected as best as possible from stresses such as overexploitation. So, for example, reduce fishing pressure. Now, the challenge, however, is that marine protected systems have not traditionally been set up with consideration of climate change. And this is something that is going to have to be addressed if we're going to ensure increased conservation under climate change into the future. And I'm going to come back to this point later on in the talk. Finally then is active intervention. And we are at a point now that we know that even if we address climate change, if we have marine protection in place, we fear that coral reefs will still struggle to persist into the future because there has been such decline, but also because there is going to be a lag time between the equilibrium of the environment becoming back to favourable conditions to allow the reefs to prosper again. And this is where, as a researcher, I believe that naturally extreme environments can play an important role into contributing to all three of these factors that we need to ultimately have effective change. So keep this slide in mind. I'm going to come back to this at the end, once I've told you a bit about what extreme environments are and the science that is being undertaken to study them, to discuss how they feed into these three points that we need to have effective change.
Emma: So this is probably a good point to then talk about what are extreme coral environments. And this is a really great question. It is not something that is actually being well defined or resolved, and it's something that myself and some other scientists are currently working to get strong definitions around, particularly as we have an increasing interest in the services they provide. But in all intents and purposes, they are environments where corals survive where we wouldn't expect. So that's where the environments are warmer. They have higher aerial cover, they have high sediment input or low pH, low oxygen, low light. So ultimately conditions where corals are not expected to be found. Corals traditionally have a very narrow range of environmental conditions where they like to survive. But actually, we're realising that corals can survive in a wider range of conditions. So the examples would include carbon dioxide vents where there's low pH, or shallow reef systems that are exposed to air for large periods of time in the day, or places like seagrass and mangrove lagoons, where there is high temperature, high fluctuation in conditions. And the reason we have an interest in these systems is that they tell us how corals can survive under unfavourable conditions. And we know if climate change, unfavourable conditions are increasingly becoming the norm, so these are almost a natural laboratory for us to explore some of the complex interactions that are really hard to tease apart within a laboratory setting.
Emma: Now these two figures here just really capture the fact that this is a global interest now in these extreme environments. The top graph with the red dots shows extreme temperature sites that have been studied in recent years. The bigger the bubble, the more research that is being conducted in that geographic location. And the one below for pH. You can see temperatures being the primary focus of study, and that's because, unsurprisingly, we really have an interest in the effect that elevated temperature is having on reefs because it is one of the biggest stresses that they're facing. But what I want to draw your attention to is the two graphs on the right. And if we look from around 2000, we can see that there's this big increase in research activity in these types of locations. And that has really done two things. One, it has increased our understanding of the capacity of corals to survive in conditions previously thought to be inhospitable for corals. But also it's allowed us to identify actually that if we look, we are increasingly finding that corals do survive in extreme locations around the world. Now, this map's from some work done in 2018. And I can tell you there has been more sites that have been added on since then, but you can see that across the globe, if we look, there are a number of extreme environments that have been identified. Carbon dioxide vents, upwelling sites, high temperature environments. And so collectively there is this network now of extreme systems that we are aware of.
Emma: So for the next part of the talk, I'm going to take you through a case study of mangrove corals. This has really been where our group's work has focused. My passion and love of mangrove corals came off the back of my PhD, where we discovered that mangrove corals were interesting because the conditions were often warmer, more acidic, had low oxygen, varying nutrients than reefs that are only a few metres away. And these are the multitude of stresses that are going to be facing corals as they try to persist into the future. So, I had this real passion around trying to understand, well, how are these corals surviving there? What can we learn? What are the tradeoffs? And ultimately do they provide knowledge to enhance our capacity to manage reefs into the future? So this is going to be very high level just to give a snapshot of some of the research that our group's doing. And I'm going to take you on a tour from the ecosystem level down to the bio cellular level of mangrove corals and summarise what we've learnt to date. So from the ecosystem level, from looking at mangrove locations across the globe now, we have found that they are very different. No two sites are the same and this is really important when we're thinking about how they can potentially be integrated into future management of reefs. A big distinction is that some have reef accreting structures. They actually form a reef. They form that framework which is so important for many of the services that corals provide, such as dissipating wave action, for example, and protecting the coastal system. Whereas other locations just have single coral colonies. So again, whilst they're very valuable for studying from a research perspective, their service value is very different. So understanding that distinction is crucial.
Emma: Moving now to the coral level. And we looked at a bunch of different sort of measurements and techniques to look at how the coral survives itself within these systems. I'm going to highlight a piece of work by a former PhD student, Dr Mickael Ros, and he looked to understand if we incubate corals, how does their physiology change? What can we learn? And so he looks at oxygen dynamics. So he looked for reef and mangrove corals here on the Great Barrier Reef. So the graph, the blue is the reef, the red is the mangrove. And what we want to highlight here is that we saw that respiration increased in these mangrove corals and this ultimately led to a change in gross photosynthesis. And the take home for that is that there are differences in the way that these corals in these mangroves actually produce their energy, their functional physiology. And this, again, has to be considered if we are thinking about moving these corals, for example, active restoration, we need to understand that they behave differently. And understanding how that behaviour is altered in new environments is a research question we need to understand when trying to think about the value these corals may have.
Emma: The next level of research we've been looking at then is the coral skeleton itself. So the coral is an animal and it has this tissue that is over the top of a calcium carbonate skeleton. And one of the questions we've been wanting to understand is how is that skeleton different in the mangroves relative to the reef? And this is a piece of work that was being led by a previous Honours student Annabel, and is currently continuing with collaborators in Israel, Dr Tali Mass. And so this is just to kind of give you a snapshot of the types of questions we're asking. So this is some SEM microscopic images of how the calcium carbonate is actually deposited. And we can see that there is potentially differences in the way that the aragonite crystals are laid down and also differences in the shape and design of the coralite structure. So the questions we now want to understand is how does this translate into differences in physical properties? Are the mangrove corals weaker, for example? Do they have greater porosity? And understanding this information can really help us kind of evaluate the trade offs, but also understand the risks that corals have if they live in these really hostile environments, that we have to remember are representative of what we're going to see increasingly into the future.
Emma: The next level then that I want to take you to is algal symbiont. So the coral is what we call a holobiont, a whole biology. So we have the animal, we have a symbiotic algae that lives in partnership with the coral. And that algae is really fundamental for providing a lot of the resources the coral requires. So we've looked at the diversity of the algal symbiont in many locations, and I'm going to provide a case study from New Caledonia in in particular, because this really represents nicely what we've seen across a variety of habitats. So in this table here, you can see two habitats, reef and mangrove, and then along the top three coral species. So A. muricata and Porites lutea and A. pulchra. Now what we looked at was for each of these different corals, what was the diversity of algal symbionts that was associated with them? And for those that are really interested, these are what we call the ITS2 profiles, but it's basically showing the genetic sequences, the diversity that was returned. Now, the take home from this, if you're not someone that is so interested in the molecular aspect, is that for some species, we saw a difference in algal species that associated with the corals. You can see with A. muricata they were actually the same, but for the other two species, they were different. Now what this tells us is that there's no single mechanism or no single relationship that seems to be universally applied to survive within these extremes. And this is crucial because if we're thinking about how we may utilise these corals in active management in the future, we have to think that there is no single coral or no single algae or no single partnership or mechanism that seems to be supporting that survival. So ensuring that we're capturing diversity is really going to be fundamental.
Emma: We're going to go even a level further into the microbiome. So this is things like the bacteria, viruses, microeukaryotes that are associated with both the algal symbiont and with the coral itself. And for this piece of work, I want to showcase and highlight some work of a former PhD student, Trent Hayden. He looked on the Great Barrier Reef at this coral species for Pocillopora acuta to see how the bacterial communities changed over time. Now the graph that you see here is just from the beginning of his work at one point in time. And what it shows us is that the bacteria that associate with these mangrove extreme corals are very different to that on the reef. So again, the implications for this are complex but also really important because again, it's telling us that there are these strong biological differences between the two species. But taking that a step further, if we starting to think more about what are the active interventions that we may as scientists want to consider, actually manipulating the bacterial assemblages is something that's being considered and like humans have their good microbiome, the same is true for corals and we're realising that they've got these functional differences that we're still trying to uncover. But if we know that these corals that live in these extreme environments have very different microbiomes, that could be a good place for us to start to focus our efforts to understand, well, which of the bacteria there that are may be beneficial or causing harm to further our knowledge of corals, especially moving into that scene.
Emma: So the last part of the research that I really want to talk about is resource exchange. So for corals to be successful across different environments, a fundamental aspect is that they can exchange resources. If everyone is exchanging resources efficiently and have what they need, they are happy. They stay in symbiosis. All is good. However, if that breaks down, that's when we start to see things like coral bleaching occur because of a stress event and then the resources available start to change between partners. So the current focus of a lot of our research in the group at the moment has been around something called the coral elementone and the coral biogeochemical niche. So the elementome is basically the makeup of the coral and algal symbionts' elemental profiles. What are the fundamental building blocks that the coral has and how are they distributed relative to what's available for them in the water column? Now, the reason that this is really important is that we know under climate change, resource availability is going to change. So we need to understand, first of all, what are the resources corals need to survive, particularly during stress, and then how a resource is going to change in the future. And ultimately, are the two going to match? Because if resources change and what corals need is going to change and resources aren't available, then we can again see that there could be issues in how corals may survive into the future. But also we can start to target maybe locations where there are favourable resources to support coral survival. So the work we've been doing at the moment, you can see an example here of the biogeochemical niche from a reef coral. You can see a variety of elements that are basically showing the spread of the spatial distribution of the reef coral. And what we see is that the extreme mangrove corals have a different biogeochemical niche. They require different elements to thrive and survive in that environment. So moving forward, we want to understand more about how the biogeochemical niche shapes the ecological success of corals, both within extreme environments but also during stress events.
Emma: So collectively, then what have we learned from studying these marine extreme mangrove environments? Well, we've learned that they're prevalent globally. And this is really important. They're not just located here on the Great Barrier Reef or over in the Red Sea. We're finding them globally, which means that they could be a viable management consideration when thinking about active intervention. In saying that, they have unique conditions. And this is part of what makes them extreme environments, but also they're different by location, by region. And so understanding and categorising actually what is the characteristics of a given extreme environment is crucial to make sure that we really understand what service provisions it may or may not provide to ensure that if we include that in intervention, we're not overpromising and under-delivering on services provided. We are learning that some corals are really, really tough. Now, this is definitely not to say that these extreme corals are going to save reefs. By no means is that the case. But they do provide some hope and potentially some innovative routes for us to explore, to help buy time the corals when we address climate change and also ensure that other mechanisms are in place to ensure and support their survival. And finally, we know that there are trade offs. For example, I mentioned that some don't have that accreting restructure or they grow slightly differently. And understanding those trade offs are key to decide, well, how can we use those corals to better support resilience and management in the future?
Emma: So I'm going to go back now to that slide that we had at the start where I said, how can we have change? And I talked about addressing climate change. I talked about marine protection and I talked about active intervention. And I now I want to kind of come back to this full circle to explain how extreme environments and the knowledge that we're gaining from them can feed into these these changes that we need. So first of all, these systems are a natural laboratory. We can see how change that we're going to experience under climate change, that we are experiencing under climate change, impacts these corals. And that is crucial to provide evidence towards policy and management as to why we need change, but also to help us direct the science and the scientific questions alongside laboratory work to make informed decisions moving forward. The next then is that they can help to update traditional marine protected parks to account for climate change. One of the challenges I said is that marine protection, so such as marine parks, were not set up to account for climate change. But there is a way to do that through something called adaptive networks. We can include areas where we know they have greater resilience to future stresses within marine protected parks to kind of provide this adaptive network globally that will increase the resilience of the system. And I recently put together a portfolio approach of how this could be included in marine management to help decide are there extreme sites that should be included in management and how could this be achieved? So the first thing is, if we include these extreme systems, we're increasing our diversity of reef portfolio that's being protective. And this is really important because we know that diversity increases the probability of this success and reduces risk. This is something that is often done in the finance sector, and the same applies in all intents and purposes to conservation efforts. These extreme systems have unique services. They have unique capacity to either buffer stresses or to house resilient corals that make them a value to be included in this portfolio. This can't be done without considering risk. And the way to maybe do this would be to consider the probability of stress and the impact of such stress if it occurred. For example, how are these systems themselves going to change into the future? How can we include them so that we are not overpromising and under-delivering on the services that they may or may not be able to provide? And this goes back to having that diversity of reef types within the portfolio of conservation to try and reduce that risk. And by considering all of that, we can then assess how best to include such service provisions that these extreme systems may provide into an active management framework.
Emma: Now, when we talk about active intervention, we're talking about actually having scientists, conservation engineers, managers intervening to try to buy time for corals, where we get our action on climate change and we have effective marine protection. And the one way that extreme systems can feed into this is by being hot spots of resilience. Now on the right, there is a selection of types of environments that have been identified as potential hope spots for reefs. This includes things like refugia, contemporary near pristine reefs, hope or bright spots, and also these hotspots of resilience. So there are a number of services that hotspots of resilience could provide for active intervention. I'm only going to touch on a few for the sake of time. The first of these is that they could be targeted for assisted evolution. Some of the activities that we are currently exploring as a research community, is there a way to speed up evolution within a lab or within nature to increase the likelihood that the corals will survive through in the future? So targeting or using corals from these extreme environments could be a good platform. I mentioned this earlier on, but probiotics and considering beneficial microbes is something that is increasingly being considered in the research community. And again, using these extreme corals can provide a good platform for making decisions over which bacteria we maybe do or do not want to include. The next is managed relocation or transplantation of these corals. Are there areas that are degraded where we can move corals from these extreme environments to try and give resilience to the parts of the reefs that are being eroded? And finally, can we use these corals as a template for synthetic biology? So if we're looking at genetic manipulation, is there a blueprint that we can take from nature looking at these extreme environments to help guide our efforts? So for me, really, these extreme environments are part of the nature based solutions. Let's not try to rewrite what nature has done for us. Let's work with nature to see how best we can move forward.
Emma: Now, I'm going to focus in on this idea of managed relocation and transplantation, because it really dovetails nicely into some of the activities that we have with industry partners as part of the Coral Nurture program. Now, I'm only going to have this one slide to talk about the current program, albeit something I'm very proud of and very excited to talk about and could talk about for hours. But Professor David Suggett will be leading the next Science in Focus all around the Coral Nurture programs. So definitely make sure you join in for that one. But the reason that I want to touch on this is that this partnership is a unique partnership between science and tourism, traditional owners coming together to try to increase the resilience of highly ecological and economical value sites on the Great Barrier Reef. To date, we've had around 80,000 corals that have been outplanted, but the key is that we need to futureproof those activities and this is where extreme corals and corals with natural resilience are crucial to the activities that are going on. On the right hand side there, you can see a series of stress testing assays that we have conducted to try and actually identify within the natural population, which corals have enhanced tolerance to persist into the future. And so it's these sorts of collaborative approaches that include the industry and science partnerships that are really going to be crucial to buy time and ultimately help ensure and conserve the reef into the future.
Emma: So to ensure that we have a long time for questions and answers, this will be my last slide. But I wanted to take this quote that I found in the State of the Environment report because for me, it really sums up the state of where we're at. "We need immediate action with innovative management and collaboration to turn things around". And this really resonated with me because the situation is poor for reefs. We know globally that the trajectory continues to decline. It provides anxiety for me as a coral researcher every time we see the headlines and we read the research. But in saying that, we have the tools and capabilities to make a change, but it's going to require this collective effort for everybody, not just the scientists, not just the policymakers, but every individual to come together to unite for the reef and nature as a whole to ensure that they persist into the future. So this quote really captured that for me, and I hope that this is that pivotal point that we now see the positive change that we need to ensure the reef is conserved into the future. So thank you for listening to our 20 minute brief round up of all of the activities that we have going on within the group around extreme environments. And at this point, I would really love to take some questions. So thank you.
Jen: Thank you so much, Emma. That was an incredibly interesting and important topic. It's really interesting to hear just what the extreme corals have to offer and it is kind of excites me as a coral biologist as well, the opportunity is out there. So just before we get started with the questions, I just wanted to remind everybody that if you have a question, please pop it in the Q&A box. And if you like one of the questions that are already there, then feel free to upvote those questions. So I'm going to kick this off because I have a burning question. How many locations of extreme corals have been kind of already found?
Emma: That's a great question, Jen. So there's up of 100 at least, if we consider kind of all of the sort of broad types from upwelling sites to the hot reefs to the mangrove locations. But as I was kind of alluding to, the more we look, the more we find and this is the thing about these kind of extremes, if you like, is it's challenging our perception of where and how corals can survive. So I would argue the more we look, the more we will likely find.
Jen: So do you think, are there other areas even around Australia that we haven't yet looked that we could potentially tap into for these extreme corals?
Emma: Yeah, definitely. I have received a few emails from people in Western Australia saying, oh, we've got corals in the mangroves here, you need to come and have a look. And so again, that's just one example. But I definitely think the more that we characterise the reef environments, the more we're realising that actually, our understanding of where corals are typically found is maybe not as narrow as we originally perceived.
Jen: Yeah, and you mentioned at the end, so there was this opportunity to perhaps transplant some of these more resilient mangrove corals into the reef. And somebody asked a question about that. So are there any risks with moving mangrove corals to a new environment?
Emma: Yeah, that's definitely a great question. And kind of within that risk framework I was talking about, we absolutely have to consider those risks and there definitely is potential risk. The worst thing we would want to do is move a coral that has a pathogen or is going to become kind of some freak Frankenstein takeover coral of the reef. And so we're really mindful of that. And so when we do these sorts of transplantations, it's done in an iterative way to try and minimise any risk. So an example would be that they are initially transplanted on racks to kind of isolate the coral from some of the surrounding environment. And we're mindful of when they would reproduce to make sure that they're taken out from that environment before they they're reproductively active, at least until we've got the knowledge to say we don't perceive any risk and we can move forward. So definitely risks, but it's a risk-cautious approach we're taking to explore these interventions.
Jen: Yeah. And I guess with the harmful, potentially harmful things that carry a risk coming with them, it could also bring benefits, maybe new fish or new crabs or other invertebrates. Have y9ou seen that occur on the transplanted corals?
Emma: So yeah, that's that's a great question and not something that we've specifically looked at with the mangrove corals. But I will say that through the Coral Nurture program, one of one of our PhD students is looking at how the structures can provide like a unique habitat for marine life. And we're definitely seeing unique fish come into a unique habitat created by the frames being there. So whether or not the same applies with these mangrove corals is yet to be tested.
Jen: Yes. So these corals do offer potentially an opportunity for not just the coral cover to increase, but also the other things that comes with a plentiful coral reef like the fish and other organisms. So another question I have, which is a really interesting one. Are mangrove corals as colourful as reef corals?
Emma: That is a great question. So yes and no. It depends on the species, but this is actually a really interesting point. So when you look above the water down at mangrove corals, they often look paler. And if we take pictures or videos, they often look paler. But when we've taken a coral fragment from the mangroves above water and actually process them, they look as colourful and they've got as many colourful pigments in them. So we actually think that sometimes it's the optics of the mangrove water that make them appear paler than they actually are. So short answer is no, they're not any less colourful, but the long answer is actually they may appear less colourful, but it's just an optics of the water difference at these mangrove locations.
Jen: On the questions, somebody has asked, and I think maybe this ties in well with this, but how does coral bleaching occur? So I think that probably ties in well with what you just said.
Emma: So yeah, it's a great question. So bleaching is a sort of physiological response to stress. Primarily, we hear about it in relation to thermal stress. So the coral is that holobiont. It's an animal with that symbiotic algae that is so important for the coral as a whole to get the resources it needs. But during times of stress, the algae actually produce some toxic elements to the coral and they are expelled. And at that point the colour sort of leaves. We see the white skeleton underneath the tissue and we say that coral bleaching has occurred and that can occur not just from temperature stress, from any stress, but temperature's kind of the one that we hear most about in Australia because of the thermal stress events that we've had.
Jen: So there's one question that's been upvoted nine times, so I feel I should definitely ask it! You did touch on it a little bit as well already, but can these more robust corals help us in genetically modifying other corals to better adapt to climate change? Now, I know you mentioned adaptive evolution, so perhaps this is related to that.
Emma: Yeah. So for me, what these sort of extreme corals, wherever they're from mangroves or from hot seas can do is provide sort of the blueprints. If we understand the genetic changes that they have naturally undergone, arguably over sort of longer timeframes than we can reproduce in the lab, that can give us a blueprint of maybe where we want to start if we're going to look at genetic modification. So that for me at least, and that's obviously my opinion, would be one of the ways that they could inform decision making in that sort of synthetic biology angle.
Jen: I guess, is that comes with a whole new level of challenges around genetic modifications and all of that jazz. So we have a question from Professor David Booth. So he said, hi, Emma, great talk. However, given the Great Barrier Reef supports billions of corals currently exposed to stresses such as bleaching, do you really think intervention will ever have any meaningful impacts at the Great Barrier Reef scale?
Emma: Hi, Dave, and great question. We're not without climate action. We fundamentally have to address climate change. I stand by that 100%. But I think that we are already seeing at local scales, not necessarily the size of the Great Barrier Reef, but at local sites on the Great Barrier Reef, that these interventions can make a difference. And that is from multiple ways. One, about education and engagement, which is crucial, I think, in ensuring that we have a future of the reef. But also if the worst happens and we continue to see this decline on the reef scale, these arguably pockets of resilience are going to become increasingly important, because for me, the worst case scenario would be that's what we have left to try to boost the resilience in the future. So by no means are these a silver bullet to save the whole reef, but they can provide, I believe, these targeted pockets of intervention that, worst case of what we have to boost the resilience into the future, when we hopefully get climate action happening to the level we need.
Jen: Yeah. So as you said, it was more, you know, doing these kind of restoration activities is buying time. The biggest thing that we need to focus on is climate change. But if we manage to resolve climate change, then we need a brood of corals to build back our reefs. So if we don't do things now, even if they are only successful at a small scale, then those corals won't be there to repopulate reefs. So it is really important what you're doing.
Emma: Thank you. And I think to add to that what you just said, Jen, I think another thing is, and this is really highlighted in the environmental report, is that we need innovation, we need collective collaboration and innovation. And I would challenge anyone listening that, you know, in other industries, engineering, to how can you help us upscale what we're doing. And again, I think that's the point, is that we also need to get to a point where these local solutions could potentially be scaled up to be more effective at scale. And that's definitely something that myself and other scientists are trying to explore. But again, it never negates the need for climate action.
Jen: Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, the transdisciplinary collaboration is something that's really only just starting to creep into the coral reef realm, I feel, as a researcher. And but there's so much untapped knowledge in that space and some of the potential things that we could do and practices that are already helping with restoration on land that haven't been attempted in reef systems, obviously being underwater, it's a bit more challenging. But yeah, I think that's a really good, really interesting point. So and something that someone's asked which given the weather in Sydney at the moment I think is highly relevant, what impact, if any, does flooding events have on corals?
Emma: So those are great, great question. Actually say that it's really, really relevant for the mangrove and inshore environments and it can be devastating. So one of the biggest impacts that we've seen so far on some of these extreme environments, such as these shallow mangrove lagoons, is freshwater input. So if there is severe rainfall, especially if there's rivers nearby and that comes onto the reef, it can bring in fresh water, it can bring in sediment, change in nutrients, all of which are not good for corals. So definitely a problem. And again, for me, that's where this risk framework of how do we actually spread the risk to maximise the chance of saving some coral stock is an important consideration for us as managers in the future.
Jen: I guess, you might think that with rain, if you're bringing loads of nutrients into the water, well, surely that's good. Those nutrients will help corals grow. But I guess that's not really the way that it works. And alongside the nutrients, you've got all the bacteria that have reefs haven't been exposed to and viruses. And that's how we're getting more and more diseases as well on top of that. So yeah, it's really, it's one of those things that I guess now Australia is having frequent flood events unfortunately. So it's another nail in the coffin I guess for reefs if we don't do something.
Emma: Yeah. And it's this layering of stresses that is so challenging. We know that reefs can recover if they're given the capacity to do so, but they are just getting one stressor after another after another. And that's the problem. They're just not getting the time to show their natural capacity to recover. And that's where, if we can find ways to just give them some boost, it's helpful given all of the stresses that are being thrown their way.
Jen: Yeah. So I think that ties in really well with a question asked by Kevin. So when corals are relocated from their extreme environment to the reefs, have you found that they retain that resilience kind of features or physiology over time?
Emma: So that's a great question. And we've had a couple of kind of research projects that aren't published but have been looking at this at the moment. And we are seeing that, at least for the couple of species that we've looked at, they do stay and retain their tolerance. And so that's something that we're really interested in, in terms of how long that may be the case. So we don't have all the answers yet, but that is definitely something that is sort of a current kind of research question for us to understand, because obviously if it's eroded, that really changes their potential value or arguably highlights the kind of need to conserve the specific area that they were originally in. So it has repercussions for how we consider and manage those systems.
Jen: Yeah, wonderful. So from a year five class in Sydney, can isolated coral colonies survive on their own?
Emma: Great question. Hello and thank you for joining. That's a great question. So they can survive on their own. But obviously the services that that isolated colony provides is very different to the reef itself. And I kind of touched on that before, but obviously we're not just interested in one or two corals. And that kind of goes, I think back to what Dave Booth was sort of getting to earlier, as we obviously want to get to a point where we've got that collective reef conservation status and for that to be successful, we need enough colonies to be reproductively viable, to have enough diversity so that when they reproduce we're getting more diversity to sustain that population. And so my answer would be we need kind of enough isolated populations to have that diversity to ensure that it does kind of continue into the future. But yeah, it could survive, but it may not provide all of the services that we ultimately want from the coral reefs.
Jen: Yeah. So and I guess as well, if the environments are changing, they're not just changing on the reef, they're also changing in the mangroves as well. So what does the future look like for these already extreme locations? Are they going to get extremer?
Emma: That is the question. That is a great question. And from the evidence that we have so far, it really depends on the location. So we know, for example, that in the Kimberleys region, it's an area in Australia where we've had some extreme corals and they were thought to be quite tolerant, but then they experienced bleaching and they were just as susceptible. Some of the species are actually more susceptible to stress because they hadn't experienced it before. Whereas other locations we've seen that they seem to be kind of buffered in some capacity to the stresses that we're seeing. And so, part of the way we're trying to answer that question is now to kind of simulate some stress testing on those resident corals to see how far we can push them. So as an example, some of the Great Barrier Reef mangrove corals, we have put in the stress testing assays and we've had them as warm as 39 degrees and they haven't shown bleaching, which is unprecedented really for corals on the Great Barrier Reef. But that's not to say that they haven't been physiologically impacted and that's now what we need to kind of understand.
Jen: Yeah. So as you said, there were expanding kind of ranges and oh, sorry, you were saying that you're testing them to see if they can survive even more extreme conditions. So there was a question that has been asked about corals moving into Sydney Harbour in greater numbers. So is Sydney Harbour an extreme condition?
Emma: So it's a great question and this goes back to our complexes of what is an extreme environment and it sort of falls into a marginal extreme environment. The conditions are less favourable than the reef environment in terms of sort of the pH for example, it's considered less favourable, but maybe the temperature is not as warm, which is favourable, but then it's cooler. So there could be cold stress. There's lots of kind of variables that we have to consider. But Jen, this may be something you want to add in, as you do a lot of research on these corals moving south. So I don't know if you want to say a little bit more on that topic as well.
Jen: Yeah, it was a really interesting question because as you said, it's something that I research a little bit, but seeing it posed in a question as an extreme environment, I've never really considered it like that before, but I suppose it is for corals in tropical areas to expand to temperate areas. For them, it's extreme. And I guess a really important kind of natural variation that it would be worth paying attention to is whether they over winter, and whether they survive and whether they reproduce and all those kind of very sensitive variables that they've adapted to on reefs like temperature control, reproduction and all that kind of processes. Is that the same in Sydney? Can we see other populous? At the moment? There's only a few corals that have migrated down to Sydney as far as we know. So is this process applicable to other species of corals? Is Sydney going to be the next home of the Great Barrier Reef? Hey, I'd love it. I could just dive straight out of university. That would be wonderful. I'd love that. And so there is another question. So differences in endosymbionts and microbiomes in mangrove versus reef corals are related to different food availability. If so, how this might affect the energy budget to mitigate stress?
Emma: Okay, there's a lot going on there, so I'm going to try and unpackage that. So great question. So we don't know the exact drivers of the differences, but one of the things that we hypothesise is that, that it is the available resources that ultimately these symbiotic partnerships that evolved over thousands of years have fine tuned to provide each member the resources that it needs. So ultimately, as the environment changes and as habitats change, how these partnerships may evolve is something that we don't really know, but ultimately is definitely possible, especially when we think of the algal symbiont. It's not just a single species often that is found within the population. And we know, for example, after bleaching events, you may see differences in both the algal and bacterial communities of a recovered coral. So it's entirely possible that as we see change, the current partnerships may change as well to favour the new resource environment. So yeah, it's a great question and definitely something that I don't think we have fully resolved, but is the sort of line of thinking that we are looking into to try and help better predict what partnerships may or may not be successful and where they may or may not be most successful.
Jen: Yeah, that's great. So all this research that you're doing and all these corals that you're experimenting on and these trips and everything like that, there's a really interesting question from John Ridge. Are you concerned about the negative impact of research projects and the aquarium industry, both domestic and commercial, on the world's reefs?
Emma: Yeah, look, this is a great question. And definitely something that we have to consider is something that we are definitely mindful of. The ultimate question is, is the research that we're doing worth the cost of the research that is happening? And we believe yes, if not, we wouldn't wouldn't be doing it. But it's definitely something that we're always mindful of. So examples would be if we take coral fragments for analysis, it's always the minimal amount that we can take to have the least impact on the system. And as a team, we've looked to cut down our travel, for example. We're obviously not based on the Great Barrier Reef, and we know that when we go out there that has a footprint. So we've looked at ways to combine trips to minimise air travel. We've driven up there sometimes. So look, it's a great point and I think not just research but any activity that is looking to have a positive impact. We have to consider the whole process, the whole cycle to really question whether or not is having a benefit. But for me, the worst situation we could be in is that we have a situation where we've lost most of the reef. We need to intervene immediately because it will be lost. But we don't have the knowledge or the scientific backing to know how to do that most effectively. And that's where the science and the research, particularly when it's focused around this intervention and that decision making framework, I think outweighs some potential risks that it could be having or the costs that it could be having.
Jen: I guess one of the ways that you're helping to mitigate any kind of coral losses, that you're also replacing coral by growing them up in these coral of these fragments of opportunity. I know you're not mentioning about the coral nurture program, Professor Suggett's next talk, but that's kind of a way, I guess when while your research you may use coral fragments, but this research is important to help the existing coral colonies to survive. And without that research, then yeah, sure, we may use corals during our research, but without that research there would be no corals if we weren't able.
Emma: But I also think it's a great question and it's the self check that we should all be having. To be asking is what we're doing. Having the outcome that we hoped for. And ultimately, without the scientific knowledge, policymakers can't make the right decisions. They can't effectively manage the reef without the evidence on how best to do that. If we're going to try and meet our climate targets, we need evidence as to why that's essential and what will happen if we don't. And that's where the research is really so important. But again, it's a great question. It's a great self-check I think we should all have.
Jen: Yeah, I mean, corals are a resource and just like everything, every resource in the world, we can't just take and take and take it for our own purposes and, and I guess permitting and there are policies that help control us. I kind of feel as well there is a more of an emphasis on non-destructive methods of investigation and that's something, I guess, is there any non-destructive methods of investigation that you've applied to mangrove corals?
Emma: Yes, that's a great point, Jen. So yeah, we, for example, developed incubation chambers. So you saw on Mickael's work that the coral had been removed and put in these chambers. We've developed these chambers, made out flexible bags that can actually be put over the coral in situ to avoid the need to remove them. So that's a great example of ways we can try to challenge our previous methods to minimise the impact that we're having.
Jen: Yeah. And maybe where these engineers and other great minds can get involved in coral research and develop new ways of non-invasive sampling. So I have a question here, what does coral eat? That is a good question.
Emma: So it depends on the species and the location and they are filter feeders. They can take in things that are around them or one of the microscopic algae that they like to have. But it's a great question, depends on where they are. And one of the things that we're kind of wanting to understand more about at the moment is what the mangrove corals eat relative to the reef corals. We know that mangroves have more resources available there than on the reef. And so we want to understand what is actually that make up of resource and how does that translate to coral fitness. So maybe if I do another talk in the future or have a better answer to that question.
Jen: So I think we've got time for one more question. And this question has had a lot of upvotes, and it's probably the one that people are most keen to ask, So what are the actions that we can do to help coral reefs? Are there any citizen science projects that we can take part in, or is there anything that we can do in everyday life to help protect coral reefs?
Emma: Yeah, that's a great question and I think that was something I was hoping was asked because to stick to my time limit, I unfortunately couldn't cover it. So the first answer I would say is any action that reduces your own carbon footprint is going to have an indirect and direct benefit on the reefs and nature as a whole. So no matter how small actions may seem, you know, taking public transport, turning the lights off, all of those choices do if everybody collectively does it, can make a big impact. And one thing that I've said time and time again is how we vote. And again, ensuring that we're voting for individuals where, you know, climate and environment is central to me is just a really valuable way if we've got a privilege to vote to ensure the environment gets the attention that it needs into the future. And then there are both local and more kind of regional and global activities that individuals can get involved in. So if you're around Sydney, there is the Sydney Harbour ... I'd have to check the exact name, but it's like the Sydney Harbor Twitter feed where you can report unique sightings. So if you saw, for example, out on a snorkel, corals in your location, you could tweet about it on that framework and obviously let people know. And that's a great way to get involved in sharing the sightings that you've seen. On the Great Barrier Reef, there's this thing called the Great Barrier Reef Census. And it's where people have uploaded pictures that they've taken from the reef and citizen science. So anyone from any background can go on, do a little bit of training, which they provide, and then you can ID Coral and other species from the videos in the pictures. And what that's allowing scientists to do is actually get a better understanding of the mapping of the Great Barrier Reef. We actually don't have great mapping because it's so big. So that's another way that people can get involved.
Jen: I guess if you're diving around Sydney, I'd be interested to know new corals that you've seen. Now, I saw something on the UN website the other day that has kind of impinged in my brain now and it was the lazy person's guide to saving the world and I thought it was wonderful because it was a really good kind of resource that even if you consider yourself a lazy person, it's that things that you could do? And I thought, that is great.
Emma: And so the Twitter account, if you're in Sydney, was Wild Sydney Harbour. So that would be the one that you can put any sightings on.
Jen: Well, thank you so much, Emma, for your talk today. And thank you everybody who attended. I'm really grateful and I'm sure Emma is as well. Thank you for your time. A copy of this talk will be available online and if you registered for the event then you should receive one in the email as well. So if you were more interested in hearing a little bit more about the Coral Nurture program, I just wanted to mention as well, that please to join our future Science in Focus webinar, where Professor Dave Suggett will be talking about the Coral Nurture program and giving you an update on that. But otherwise, thank you so much for coming today. Enjoy the rest of your day.
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Science in Focus Series – How to catch a killer with your own DNA
Marie: Hi everyone and welcome to Science in Focus, a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS researchers and scientists. I'm Dr. Marie Morelato and I'm a Senior Lecturer and the Course Director of the Bachelor of Forensic Science at UTS, and I will be the moderator for today's session. I'll be asking our speaker any questions that you have and asking them at the end of the talk. So today it is very exciting. We'll find out how our DNA might be used to catch a killer. So forensic genetic genealogy has the potential to find the genetic relatives of any perpetrator who leaves their DNA on a crime scene. So that means that anyone and everyone, including you, could be a genetic informant. So, to tell us a little bit more about this new development in forensic genomics, we are joined by two UTS researchers today. But before I introduce our speakers, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation upon which ancestral lands our city campus now stands. I would also like to pay respect to elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land.
Marie: So, before we start, I'm just going to do a little bit of housekeeping. If you have any questions during today's webinar, just please type them into the Q&A box in your Zoom control panel, and we'll do our best to answer them depending on the time. If you like a question someone else has asked and would like it answered in priority, please use the voting tool, which is the little thumbs up, that is the symbol that is next to the question itself.
Marie: So, this session will be recorded, but we will not be recording any video or audio input from the audience. So now to the interesting part of this webinar, our speakers. So we have two speakers today, Professor Dennis McNevin from the Centre for Forensic Science suggests, and Dr. Nathan Scudder, who is the Coordinator of Research and Innovation, Policy Development and Innovation at the Australian Federal Police. So, our first speaker is Dennis McNevin, who is a professor in the Centre for Forensic Science. His research has focused on all aspects of DNA profiling from the extraction of DNA from difficult substrates, like bone and hair, to the next generation DNA sequencing technologies, and the prediction of genetic ancestry from DNA. He has provided forensic genetic services to the New South Wales Police Force and the New South Wales Health Pathology Forensic Analytical Science Service and is currently seconded to the Australian Federal Police National DNA program for unidentified and Missing Persons. So, Dennis how does forensic genetic genealogy work?
Dennis: Thanks very much, Marie. I'm going to start off by showing you some results from genetic ancestry that I've received from what we call 'direct-to-consumer' genomics service providers. So, on screen now, you should be able to see a genetic ancestry result, which I've received from a company called 23 and me. And they have identified that most of my genomic ancestry is from North Western Europe, but in particular from the British Isles and Ireland with County Cork highlighted. So I've also submitted my DNA to another company called Ancestry DNA. And in both cases, what I had to do was to spit into a tube and send about 10mLs of my saliva in the post to these companies in America. And my second result here from Ancestry DNA shows more or less the same thing. You can see that my ancestry, my genetic ancestry has been narrowed down to the British Isles and in particular Ireland. Now, this coincides with research that my father did many years ago, 20 or 30 years ago, before any of this genetic ancestry was available. And he looked at birth records, death records, church records, and he was able to trace our ancestors back to County Cork in Ireland. So it's reassuring that the results I've received from genetic ancestry are consistent with the ancestry that my father was able to trace back through documentary records. So it seems like these ancestry predictions are more or less accurate, certainly in my case.
Dennis: Now there's lots of other information that you can obtain from these service providers. And one of the latest features from Ancestry DNA is that you can find out which part of your ancestry comes from either of your parents. So you can see here in this in this graphic from Ancestry DNA that we've got two halves to this genetic ancestry, Parent One and Parent Two. They can't tell which parent, so we don't know whether it's my biological father or my biological mother. But one parent has bequeathed to me mostly Irish ancestry, and the other parent has bequeathed Irish ancestry at about 50% and English North Western European ancestry. Now in these service providers like Ancestry DNA, you can construct a family tree that reflects these genetic ancestry results, and you can attach to these trees documentary records of the type that my father used to trace our ancestry back. So, what it means is that you can then construct a family tree that includes and incorporates both your genetic record and documentary evidence. And this is then used to locate other potential relatives that you might have. So occasionally I'll get a notification from a service provider like this that tells me that I've got a first or second cousin that may be included in my family tree, even though I didn't put that person there. And that's because they're able to predict, based on my DNA, that this person might be related to me and might be included in my family tree. And then I can go in and verify those connections.
Dennis: So how is this possible? How can these companies make these predictions and help me build out my family tree? Well, it's based on the genetic principles of inheritance and the fact that we share DNA with our genetic relatives. And the more closely related we are to somebody, the more of our DNA that we share. So, this graphic here demonstrates that principle where this is me in the middle, the self, and you can see that my close genetic relatives, my brother, my sisters, my parents and my children, they share half of my DNA by descent. Further out: uncles, grandparents, aunts, nieces and nephews share a quarter of my DNA by descent, and we can keep working our way outwards through these concentric circles to get to very distantly related genetic relatives like cousins once-, twice- and thrice removed. And of course, as we move further out, the smaller that that fraction of DNA shared with me.
Dennis: So, here's another diagram that shows essentially the same thing. This is in a family tree format. So here I am here in orange. Here's my parents. I share 50% of my DNA with my father, 25% with my grandfather, 12 and a half percent with my great grandfather, etc. And as we move over here to these distant relatives, like third cousin, twice removed, it's much less than 1% of my DNA that I that I share with them.
Dennis: Now, what's the physical mechanism of this dilution of DNA as we move away from my close genetic relatives? It occurs by a process called linkage. And this graphic here represents a family tree, or, as we call them, pedigrees. And down the bottom, we have two first cousins. Here they are here. They have two parents. And those parents also have parents. And they're linked by these common ancestors at the top here. So this these two individuals, the most recent common ancestors for the two first cousins at the bottom. Now, each of this first generation up here have got, where squares represent males and circles represent females, have got these two coloured bars and they represent chromosomes, which are the packages of DNA that we have inside the cells in our body. And so, these chromosomes, in the process of reproduction, they get shuffled by a genetic process called recombination. And so, the chromosomes that are passed down to the offspring are shuffled. And that's what's represented by these different colours in the bars in this first generation. And then when we get to the second generation, the first cousins, you can see that that shuffling has been even more, because it's shuffling upon shuffling. And so, it means that two genetic relatives will share stretches or fragments of DNA that are uninterrupted. And these are called IBD segments, IBD meaning identity by descent. So, this little section of DNA in orange here on the two chromosomes shared with the two first cousins, they are shared uninterrupted, and that's an indication that they are genetically related.
Dennis: Now here's a graphic which shows how that process of recombination and shuffling leads to a gradual disintegration of linkage blocks. So, these stretches of uninterrupted DNA will become shorter and shorter as we move through the generations so that eventually, as we move through many generations, 100, 1000, those little IBD segments become smaller and smaller. And so, the further you are away from a genetic relative, the smaller the shared blocks of DNA that you have. And those blocks can be measured, the lengths of those blocks can be measured. So, here's a table from the Shared CentiMorgan Project, where the lengths of these IBD segments that are shared with genetic relatives are indicated with possible ranges. Okay. So here I am in the middle, in the self. You can see that my parents should share about three and a half thousand centimorgans of DNA with me. Now, it's not exact. There's a range there, but it's about three and a half thousand. My daughter should also share about the same amount of DNA. My siblings should share about two and a half thousand centimorgans of DNA with me. And so on, we can move out through my family tree to more distant genetic relatives so that by the time we get to fifth cousin, three times removed, we're down to only about ten centimorgans. And that really represents about the limited detection of these genealogy methods.
Dennis: So, what does that mean? Well, it means that an unknown profile can potentially be identified using these genetic relationships. So, in this pedigree here, this black circle represents an unknown profile that we're trying to identify that has been uploaded to a genetic database. And some putative relatives have been identified because they have been suggested to be of the right genetic distance, to be equivalent to second cousins or first cousins twice removed. So, what that means is then we can then go to these potential genetic relatives, build up the family trees to most recent common ancestors, and then build the tree down again to the unknown profile to potentially identify that unknown individual. So that's the science behind genealogy. I'll now hand back to Marie, who's going to take us to the next section of the of the presentation.
Marie: Thank you, Dennis. So, let's hear from our second speaker, who is Dr. Nathan Scudder, who is the coordinator of research and Innovation within the Policy Development and Innovation Branch of the Australian Federal Police. He has worked in operations including the Bali bombings in 2002 and Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Building on his legal and forensic background, Nathan researched the privacy and legal implications of advanced DNA technology for forensic science and received his doctorate from the University of Canberra in 2020. Nathan is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Industry in the Centre for Forensic Science at UTS and is a member of the Australian Forensic Genetic Genealogy Collaboration, working to assess the feasibility of advanced DNA capabilities to solve crimes in Australia. So, Nathan, how did forensic genetic genealogy come about in law enforcement and how is it being used?
Nathan: Thanks Marie and thank you to UTS for the opportunity to present as part of the Science in Focus series. Before I start, just a few quick disclaimers. The federal government is in caretaker mode at the moment, and because I work for the AFP, to the extent any topics come up that are at issue in the federal election, I can only provide factual information. All other views and comments are my own and this presentation doesn’t constitute legal advice. I should also note the presentation I'm about to give does include a couple of case studies relating to violent crime.
So as Dennis has explained, that inheritance of DNA means that if two individuals are found to share segments of DNA, we can hypothesise that they have a common ancestor. The more DNA they share and particularly long uninterrupted segments of DNA, the closer that ancestor should be to the present day. So being able to identify individuals through these shared DNA is certainly of interest from a law enforcement perspective. But a number of things needed to happen in order to make this possibility a reality. So, in terms of the genetic testing that Dennis has explained, Monday was National DNA Day and you could buy one of these DNA test kits if you tried hard enough for about $40 or $50. Those prices were unheard of only a few years ago.
Nathan: When you're talking about crime scene evidence or samples from human remains, the price is still in the thousands of dollars, but that price has also reduced considerably over recent years. But law enforcement isn't going to pay thousands of dollars to sequence DNA if there's nothing to compare it to. And the size of the databases to which you can send your DNA have increased exponentially in recent years. As we'll discuss, law enforcement doesn't have access to all of those databases and those that do provide access, have an opt in, opt out arrangement for crime scene comparison. But we're still at the point now where there are enough profiles available. This technique has certainly been shown to be feasible in the US. And research here is showing that it is also feasible in the Australian population and many other countries. But even that's not enough. Because knowing that two people are second cousins doesn't help unless you can show exactly who their common ancestor was. When I first started researching my own family tree about 20, 30 years ago as well, if you hit a brick wall and that's a question you couldn't immediately solve, the solution was to go to the church records, to go to an archive, to check a cemetery. If you're researching your own family tree, that's feasible. If you can research these questions over many years, if you have money to travel, there are certainly some people who would argue you're not a true genealogist until you've mastered the microfiche readers at the National Library. But for law enforcement, that is not feasible. You need ready access to those records to build those trees as Dennis showed. And over the last 5 to 10 years, we've seen a huge digitisation of genealogy records in Europe, in the UK, in the USA and here in Australia there's a lot of information now available and searchable. In fact, only as recently as about a month ago, the US released the 1950 census. And an army of volunteers went to work to index all of those records so that genealogists could type in a name and find a census record, find out where their ancestors lived, what their occupation was, who was living with them, and so forth. So having that information at our fingertips makes this technique possible.
Nathan: So, I'm just going to walk through a couple of quick case studies. The first case was one of the very early cases where forensic genealogy was used. It's the case of the "Buck Skin Girl". Here's a quote: 'after decades of work, hundreds of leads it was to forensic genealogists at their computers in the middle of the night who cracked the case'.
Nathan: So, the Buck Skin Girl was murdered near Troy, Ohio, in the early eighties. She could not be identified. She was wearing a distinctive jacket, hence the name. But she was ultimately buried in a 'Jane Doe' grave. Investigators retained one vial of unrefrigerated blood. And that was kept for 37 years until the charity group called the DNA Doe Project raised money to sequence that blood. And I have to disclose here, I do some volunteer work with that organisation. This particular case well and truly predates that. They had that analysis done. What that analysis came back with, was genetic data with about half of the markers that you would get if you spat into a tube and sent it to one of these online providers. But that's plenty, that number of markers is sufficient. And by uploading that to a public database, which at the time had about 800,000 profiles in it, after the data had been analysed. The top of the list was a user who had uploaded their DNA. The amount of DNA they shared was that of around a first cousin once removed. So what does that mean? So in terms of constructing that family tree, we've got the match, we know that their parents and grandparents is about as far back as you then need to build. You're really looking at children of a sibling of the mother or the father. You don't know which. So you have to build down all of those lines. And then you start looking at all the first cousins and first cousin once removed. It's slightly simplified, but assuming you know the relative ages of the match and the Buck Skin Girl, you can conclude that the Buck Skin girl should be the child of one of those first cousins. And I said, you don't know which side of the family they're on. So you have to build down all of those lines to map out that tree. But you've probably only got a dozen or so individuals, perhaps, that you've had to map out from that information. Now, in the case of the Buckskin Girl, that match had information that led the DNA DOE Project team to a number of family trees on the Ancestry.com platform. And one of those close relatives had actually marked one of these individuals in the tree as missing, presumed deceased. Now, that's not enough. This is purely an intelligence lead. So you've now got to go back to the investigators, even with that enormous coincidence. They need to do additional testing. They need to find a close family member. Use all of our usual forensic processes. Take a DNA sample from them. Compare it directly to the DNA from the Buckskin Girl sample to confirm that that match was correct. They did all of that and they confirmed that the buckskin girl was Marcia King, detective quoted as saying, "We can start a victimology now", the tips have already started coming in. Now, this case is now four years old. It's still an open homicide investigation, but they have had some tips that have come through. So that was one of the very early cases, but only two weeks later, there was the case of the Golden State killer, and this is the case that attracted worldwide media attention.
Nathan: So the Golden State killer, also known as East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, the Visalia Ransacker, the Diamond Knot Killer. This is a geographically mobile offender. He was committing burglaries, sexual assaults and murders up and down California in the seventies and eighties. He stopped offending in 1986. Now some have speculated, I haven't ever seen this confirmed, that that was around the time when DNA evidence first started coming in and the significance that will become apparent in a second, but that may have been why he stopped offending at that point in time. So this case was never really cold. They always had investigators working this case. And more recently, they started to look at big data analytics. So they were looking at municipal records. They were looking at prison records. They were trying to work out whether they could find someone who fit that description of the Golden State killer. And they had plenty of eyewitness descriptions. They had his DNA. But of course, it matched no one. But why was the Golden State killer in these locations at these times? Did he go to prison? What, did he die in 86? All these questions were being analysed. When they actually identified the Golden State killer and they went back to those lists, his name wasn't on any of them. So he would almost, almost certainly have gotten away with these crimes had it not been for this technique.
Nathan: So this time when they uploaded the DNA and fortunately, some of the investigators had retained additional samples from some of these crimes, that they could go back to and re-sequence using this this new DNA technique and get enough of those markers to upload to these databases. They didn't get a first cousin once removed. I understand their closest match was a third cousin. So we're talking about far more distant relatives. And they effectively took the top 25 matches and they started building back the trees. Now, this was this is quite an involved process. It took them three or four months. They had investigators going to cemeteries to check dates of death and so forth. It was quite an involved process, but given the amount of investigative time that had gone into this case, now that's a drop in the bucket in terms of building back that tree. What they ended up with was narrowing the case to about five male individuals. There was one in particular in that list that really stood out. He was a former police officer. There were some other indicators in terms of why they wanted to take a close look at him. They took a covert sample and they could not exclude Joseph James D'Angelo from the original crime scene evidence. He has since gone to trial. He entered a guilty plea on 13 counts of murder and 13 counts of kidnapping. Some of the other crimes had reached their statute of limitations. But that crime was solved. It attracted a lot of attention, and it gave some closure to the individuals, the relatives and the victims of the Golden State killer.
Nathan: So that case, those two cases are very early cases. This is just a chart showing the use of this technique by law enforcement since that time. This is courtesy of a project in Mendeley that is tracking all of the cases they can identify where the technique's used. So you can see a steady stream of cases over the last three or four years. The technique is increasing in terms of interest from law enforcement, but it relies on that support from the public in terms of making their data available for comparison. That process, of course, raises some privacy and ethical concerns, which we will come to shortly. So with that, I'll hand back to you, Marie.
Marie: Thank you, Nathan. So many of our attendees today may have taken a genetic ancestry test with a direct to consumer genetic testing company. Does that mean that the DNA is being used for forensic genetic genealogy, whether they like it or not?
Nathan: Oh, thank you, Marie. It's important to note there are only two platforms, and they're some of the smaller platforms that actually permit law enforcement use of that data. And that's the site called GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA. And both of these sites now have an opt in, opt out arrangement for criminal use of samples. So users do have the option of allowing their DNA to be used by law enforcement in this way or opting out of that process. GEDmatch does allow some wider use for human remains and information only. For those who opted in, though, the law enforcement do not have access to the raw DNA. They only have access to information about how much DNA they share with it, with any particular sample that's uploaded. So if they share any DNA at all, that will appear in an extensive list of potential matches. But the technique also does rely on public records. So it's important to note that individuals who publish their family trees and sites like Ancestry could form a critical step in the investigative process. That information might help construct trees just like it did in the Buckskin Girl case. So those trees are being used without explicit consent. They're effectively being treated as published information. Maintaining that public trust and confidence is critical to this capability because if people are concerned about this data being misused in any way, they will simply remove it from these databases. They'll hide their trees. They'll opt out of law enforcement matching. Some of these issues extend beyond law enforcement use. And certainly people who are providing any sample to a commercial database need to be aware that other individuals, aside from law enforcement, can match with their particular genetic data. And there have certainly been individuals who have had surprises come up in their in their family trees after uploading to one of these platforms. Back to you, Marie.
Marie: Thank you for that. Dennis, for those companies that do allow law enforcement use of their holdings, how extensive is the reach of forensic genetic genealogy? Can we really find a genetic relative of any donor of the crime scene DNA sample?
Dennis: Yeah. Thanks, Marie. So this scenario has been modelled and what we see on the screen now is, on the left hand side here, you can see a plot that shows the probability of finding a match on a typical forensic genetic genealogy database based on the degree of genetic relationship. So over on the right here, we have our first cousins once removed. And, you know, the probability is very low of finding a match. And so it would be even lower for a sibling or a parent. But as we move out towards more distant relatives, like second cousins, third cousins, fourth cousins, etc., then that probability of finding a match increases. So it's very, very likely that almost 100% likely, that you'll find a fourth cousin on these databases. But of course, as Nathan has explained, that's a very distant relative and not always useful because the family trees that need to be constructed are quite extensive. So over on the right here, you can see some modelling that shows how big these databases need to be in order to find a genetic relative. So the green line represents the probability of finding a first cousin. The blue line is the probability of finding a second cousin. The brown line is the probability of finding a third cousin. And the black line is probability of finding a fourth cousin. And you can see that you only need about 2% of the population, that's any population, to be present in these databases before it becomes very close to 100% probable that you will locate a third or a fourth cousin. And certainly third cousins are very useful. And that provides quite a likelihood that you'll be able to identify genetic relatives. So 2% seems to be a ballpark figure in order to find anybody from their genetic relatives in these databases. So are we there yet? Well, let's look at the holdings of these databases in the US because that's where these companies are and where the majority of the subscribers are. And you can see that the biggest direct to consumer service provider is Ancestry DNA with over 20 million profiles in its database followed by 23andMe with over 12 million. MyHeritage with five and a half million, FamilyTreeDNA with almost 2 million and Living DNA with a little bit less. So in total, we've got over 40 million profiles available in these databases. Now, 40 million is about 10% of the US population, so well over that 2%. So the potential is certainly there for identification of just about any unknown profile. But of course, we have to remember that not all of these profiles are available or accessible by law enforcement. And as Nathan has explained, there's only a couple of providers that provide law enforcement access at the moment. One of them is FamilyTreeDNA. The other is a company called GEDmatch. And so when we look at the holdings of these two providers, with each of them having well over a million subscribers, again, you can see that we've got over 3 million profiles that are in these two providers that are potentially accessible by law enforcement. Now, 3 million is about 1% of the US population. So you can see that we are certainly getting near that ballpark figure. But the other thing to remember is that not all of the of these profiles are available. So for FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch, subscribers need to opt in, so they have to choose to make their DNA available for law enforcement use for violent crimes at least. So it's going to be an even smaller fraction of this 3 million that have made or opted in or chosen to make their DNA available for law enforcement use. So not at 2%, but you can see the trajectory is increasing. There are increasing numbers of subscribers to these service providers. In fact, I heard the other day that forensic genetic genealogy, anyway, is the second most popular hobby in the world after gardening. So certainly there's potential to reach that 2%. Thanks, Marie.
Marie: Thanks, Dennis. Interesting. Are there any other uses of forensic genetic genealogy beyond catching killers?
Dennis: Yes, there are. And as Nathan has explained there are some ethical concerns about the use of these databases, and surveys have demonstrated that there is some polarisation in the community about those who think that DNA should be used for law enforcement to find perpetrators of violent crimes, and those that think that they shouldn't be or that there should be some caution. Now, one use of these databases seems to have fairly high levels of public acceptance, is to use them for missing persons investigation. So not criminal matters, but but coronial matters. Looking at missing persons and unidentified human remains. Now, there are a lot of programs around the world that are involved, that are dedicated towards this endeavour, including in Australia, the Australian Federal Police, National DNA program for unidentified and Missing Persons. And certainly, forensic genetic genealogy is one of many techniques that this national program are using to help identify human remains and bring closure to families who might have missing persons. There's a couple of caveats, though, when we're talking about unidentified human remains. And I want to begin by talking about how these DNA profiles are uploaded to the genetic service providers, how they're produced, and they're produced using a technology called microarrays. And on the left here, you can see this is what a microarray looks like. It's basically about the size of a large microscope slide, and it consists of about a million wells, from half a million to a million tiny little wells etched into the surface of this plate. And each well is responsible for returning the DNA profile at a very small location on the genome. So, in total, we're surveying about half a million to a million locations on the human genome. So, we're not sequencing the whole genome. We're just sampling from it, about half a million to a million locations on the genome. But that's enough to create these identity by descent segments that we're interested in. And these microarrays can then be read on an instrument like the one at the right here of this this picture to create these DNA profiles. Now, as I've mentioned before, you need about 10mLs of saliva to provide enough DNA to do that. And it has to be good quality DNA as well. But the problem with missing persons is that we're often dealing with skeletonised human remains and we're trying to retrieve DNA from a bone fragment like the one shown here. And unfortunately, DNA is very difficult to, in many cases, it's very difficult to retrieve from bones because of the matrix that it's encased in. The bone is made up of calcium, and calcium can interfere with downstream analyses. And not only that, but the DNA is often degraded, especially if the human remains have been exposed to the environment for many years or buried in a clandestine grave. But it can be very difficult to obtain high quality DNA. And so the microarrays don't often work. So there's a lot of research being looked at, trying to create DNA profiles that are sufficient for uploading to these genetic genealogy databases using other technologies, perhaps whole genome sequencing or a technique called targeted amplicon sequencing. So, yes, missing persons investigations and unidentified human remains is certainly another application for forensic genetic genealogy. Back to you, Marie.
Marie: Thank you Dennis. So, Nathan, is everyone on board with forensic genetic genealogy? Why might someone be wary of signing up for law enforcement use of the DNA?
Nathan: Thank you, Marie. And certainly there are a number of considerations in uploading DNA and providing consent for law enforcement matching. We need to distinguish between those broader issues around simply providing your DNA to a company. And I've already touched on the unexpected surprises that individuals have come across in their own family trees. You're also trusting a company in terms of data security and privacy to safeguard that genetic data. But that applies irrespective of whether you allow any law enforcement matching. When you come to law enforcement matching, there's obviously a lot of good that can come of that in terms of solving cases. The data we're seeing from GEDmatch is that over 70% of new subscribers are opting in to allow their data to be used in this way, but there are some risks and concerns. So forensic genealogy really is a family donation. And law enforcement investigations could implicate a family member in a crime. It could also be used to try to identify a distant relative who is unidentified in terms of being a missing person. Now that in terms of the criminal aspect, could be a very distant relative, but it could also be someone closer to you. So most of the cases we've seen involve second and third cousins of any of the matches. Not too much closer. But the Buckskin Girl is the one exception where those individuals who uploaded would have been aware of that individual in their tree. It could even apply to individuals who are not yet born yet. So those individuals, once they're on once your DNA is on that database, they are within reach of this technique. The technique also doesn't know any geographic borders. So once you opt in, you've opted in for use worldwide. And we know this technique is more common in the United States at the moment. And that brings into play issues around the death penalty and cases where individuals could be subject to the death penalty if convicted. There are many, many individuals who are happy to assist law enforcement, but would be concerned if that assistance resulted in a capital investigation. There's also a lot of controversy around Baby Doe cases. Now, these are on the face of it, cases where we're looking to identify an infant or a baby. Of course, that identification almost always then results in a close family member being a suspect in their death. So that is one that cuts across between human remains, identification and the criminal side and very hard to differentiate between the two. So my research, a work in this area really has been about developing policies and strategies that can ensure that this technique will be used appropriately and will maintain that public trust and confidence. Part of this is ensuring that there is awareness of what this technique can and can't do, and that applies as much to investigators who may be receiving intelligence leads from forensic genetic genealogy. There's always more work to do after that initial lead is generated. It's never enough to go and lock someone up. It's never enough to go and knock on a door and give a family the news that their loved one's been found. This is one piece of a puzzle. It can greatly assist law enforcement, but then needs to be followed up by traditional forensic and investigative work to ensure that's a sound conclusion. It's a technique that some have said will end the serial killer, that it will stop these recidivist offenders because we'll be able to cut them off after a small number of offences rather than allowing them to continue to offend for decades. We'll see whether that holds true. But it does pose, certainly it is of great interest to law enforcement around the world, but needs to be implemented in a very careful way to ensure we keep the public on board. Thanks, Marie.
Marie: Thank you so much, Nathan and Dennis as well. I'll just share my screen again and we're going to go for the Q&A session. So we had quite a few questions already on the chat and also at registration, so we'll try to go through them during the time remaining. So I had a look at the question and there is one in particular that attracted a lot of attention, and I think I'm going to give it to Dennis. What type of jobs are available in forensic science area after graduating?
Dennis: So are we talking about jobs that could involve forensic genetic genealogy or just any jobs in forensic science?
Marie: I'd say it's more general, but you can probably focus on forensic genetic genealogy, maybe.
Dennis: So, I mean, obviously, forensic science is the use of science to help solve legal questions and questions of interest to the courts. And so the destination of choice for most of our graduates is with either a police jurisdiction or in in states where forensics is conducted outside of the police, a forensic laboratory. So, you know, in Australia, there are some states where forensics is conducted within the police, like the Australian Federal Police and Victoria Police. And there are other states like New South Wales where forensics is conducted inside another state department, Department of Health, for example. So that's obviously a prime employer of forensic graduates. But forensic science is really, it's a science. And so our graduates are also very qualified to work in a number of other settings in any laboratory based setting, for example, but also professions that require critical thinking and analysis and the gathering of intelligence to try and answer other questions, not necessarily legal ones. So I hope I've addressed that question.
Marie: I think yeah, I think it's fine. If they have more questions, you can always ask at a later stage. The next one, it's also related to degree. It's probably from a student. If I'm majoring in CSI, do I have to work as a police officer before working in crime scenes, or is there a different route that can be taken? So maybe for Nathan this time.
Nathan: In most jurisdictions, no, there's a separate intake of forensic members into crime scene areas. It would depend on the state and territory. But by and large, there is a direct entry program out of forensic university programs into that field.
Marie: Great. Thank you. Then I've got a question from Claude. Ethical concerns and public confidence are often stated as critical consideration before this approach can be applied. Not saying it's not important, however, conceptually, how is it different from investigators searching out of reach through databases using an incomplete number plate followed by traditional investigating techniques? So maybe, Nathan, again, I'd say from the law enforcement perspective.
Nathan: And there are certain elements of this approach involving the genetics that make it more privacy intrusive. So we need to factor in the DNA specific aspects when we consider the privacy implications that we are looking at family relationships, these there are sensitivities around families, family groups, cultural sensitivities that we need to work through. So it's not quite as simple as some of those other investigative techniques. And yes, there are many, some are not very intrusive, like searching a number plate. Others may be more intrusive, like pinging mobile phone towers or carrying out other forms of more invasive surveillance. But we need to ensure that with all these capabilities that we've considered the privacy implications, that we've got the frameworks and governance in place to make sure that they're being applied in the most appropriate cases, and therefore, that we can maintain that public confidence in any police technology that we might use.
Dennis: I mean, if I can just add to that one, Marie. I mean, I think the question from Claude highlights an important consideration, that there are similarities with other investigative techniques. So, for example, one of the first ports of call in many investigations these days is social media. And a lot of familial relationships can be found in social media, you know, including Facebook, photos of marriages and where everyone's tagged in the photograph. And so a lot of these familial relationships can be also made available from other sources. But as Nathan points out, there are some aspects of DNA that require extra attention.
Marie: Thanks for that. The next one is how far back in family history does the DNA Ancestry results show? So I think, Dennis, you mentioned that as well in your talk. So maybe a question.
Dennis: Yeah. So I've only just been made aware recently thanks to Nathan about a couple of cases of forensic genetic genealogy that have been applied to historical crimes. One about a hundred years old, post-mortem interval, and one about 150 years old. So certainly that range is possible. You have to remember that the farther you go back in time, the more removed the deceased person, or the deceased person in many cases, is from the most recent common ancestor. So the family trees involved are going to be very extensive the further you go back in time. So that perhaps creates a limit as to how far you can go back using forensic genetic genealogy, remembering that, you know, that ten centimorgans is probably the limit of detection that we can apply to forensic genetic genealogy. So once you get to three or four times removed for a, for a relative, it becomes quite difficult to construct that family tree. Most of the crimes that have been solved, the cold cases using forensic genetic genealogy are really within a few decades. But certainly it is possible to go back further.
Nathan: I'll just add to that as well, if I may. In terms of the limits of this technique, certainly around ten centimorgans. Those types of matches are still actionable. They certainly can assist in reinforcing your existing hypothesis because effectively you're triangulating matches back in time. So it's not uncommon with this technique to be building trees that do go back to the 1700s, sometimes even the 1600s, and linking together quite a number of matches to try and work down to the present day. You don't know until you upload the sample whether you're looking at a case like the Buckskin Girl with a potential first cousin once removed, or whether you're way out in in terms of potential matches. That's one area we're looking at in Australia is just how effective will this technique be when we upload any samples? Are we going to get close enough matches on a regular basis or are the databases just not quite, don't quite yet contain enough Australian profiles that we're going to start to get closer matches, which makes it more efficient?
Marie: Thank you for that. And another question for Nathan this time, could the providers be ordered by court to make the records available regardless of opt in options or policy of providers?
Nathan: It is possible for a court to order the disclosure of any information subject to some kind of warrant or subpoena. The larger providers like AncestryDNA have had some requests through legal process and they've resisted all of them. I would imagine a company like Ancestry and 23andMe would be taking their own action to protect their client information if there was some kind of warrant or subpoena issued requiring them to hand over or search their database. So apart from those very specific instances where it's been tried and then quickly overturned, I'm not aware of any case where that has resulted in information being released. It may well make its way right up through the courts if anyone ever tried to push that that line too hard.
Marie: Thank you, Nathan. Dennis, you mentioned in the beginning of the presentation that DNA can be used to determine geographical backgrounds, ethnicity of an individual. Is this side of the technology used in law enforcement, or is it mainly to try and find genetic links with DNA databases?
Dennis: So if I understand the question correctly, yes, it is used or can be used by law enforcement. So the same algorithms that are used to find genetic ancestry can be used to identify genetic relatives. But perhaps the question is asking, is the genetic ancestry of an individual useful for a forensic investigation? And the answer is yes, because you can use that information to narrow a pool of potential suspects or candidates just as much as you can by finding genetic relatives. So if you are able to determine that the donor of a crime scene that you're interested in, a person of interest has Irish ancestry like I do, then you can eliminate from that investigation any suspects that you might have that have other what we call biogeographical ancestries. So someone who has essentially an East Asian by geographical ancestry or an African by geographical ancestry, and then concentrate your efforts onto those individuals whose ancestry is predicted by these algorithms.
Marie: Thank you. And I think we have time for one more question. I'm sorry if we didn't get through all the questions, but there was quite a few. So I've just got to ask Nathan, would this technology be used for events like 9/11 with bone fragments?
Nathan: It certainly can be used in disaster identification type scenarios. In fact, one example is the campfire wildfires in California a few years ago. Most of the identifications were made by close family members providing DNA, which was then compared to the deceased individuals. But there were a small number where there wasn't a close enough relative to compare to. And in those cases, this exact technique was used. Building back their family trees and identifying and building down to relatives who provided samples in those databases. So they provided that extended reach that was needed to inform the coroner, they already had other circumstantial evidence as to where the deceased was found and so forth that supported identification. But this this technique was then used to provide that additional evidence to a coroner that led to those identifications.
Marie: Thanks a lot. And again, I'm really sorry if we didn't manage to get through all the questions, but I want to thank again the two speakers today for this really interesting and really lively talk. I learned a lot myself, so we will send a copy of today's talk along with the Q&A session to everyone who registered. And it will also be on our website. So you've got the website here on this slide. So if you wanted to have a look at it at a later stage, you are welcome to do so. And just before I leave you today, we've heard some really innovative approach to forensic science. And amongst other things, it has shown how forensic science can capitalise on digital transformation and technology to better integrate with investigations. These topics will be further debated with world experts at the forthcoming IAFS conference in 2023 in Sydney. The meeting is in good hands because Dennis is one of the discipline convenors for that conference and so make sure you stay tuned if you are really interested in that field. And I think I'm going to close the session today and have a great day, everyone, and thanks a lot for coming along and thanks again to the speakers.
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Hello and welcome to UTS Science in Focus, a free public lecture series that showcases the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. I'm Dr Lucy Buxton and I have the pleasure of being the moderator for today's session. Today is World Science Day, an annual event that's celebrated around the globe that highlights the significant role of science in society and the need to engage in wider public debates on emerging scientific issues. It also underscores the role scientists play in broadening our understanding of the remarkable fragile planet we call home. Coral reefs are among some of the world's most important ecosystems, providing natural habitat for millions of species, protecting our coastal cities and adding millions of dollars into our global economy. But coral reefs are at risk from climate change, environmental stress and other factors. Even if we could abate climate change and reduce ocean warming tomorrow, many stakeholders want to rebuild what has already been lost. There may not be a silver bullet, but reef restoration is an important aid, and the innovations being produced today are bringing down the cost and increasing scale daily. There's considerable effort around the world to protect and restore coral reefs and support the communities that rely on them. Protecting the reefs brings together diverse stakeholders and experts from science, business, industry and community. Today, we're joined by four fantastic speakers to explore their perspectives from across science and economics and community on the restoration practices that are being developed and the positive impact it's having right now to protect these incredible ecosystems. Before I introduce the speakers today, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands.
I'd also like to pay respect to elders past and present, acknowledging them as traditional custodians of knowledge on this land. Just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. With this being an online event, do bear with us if we have any technical issues, we'll work to resolve them as quickly as possible. If you find at any stage you're not able to talk, to access the talk at any point, please try logging out and logging back in again. If you have any questions during today's panel, we encourage you to type those into the Q&A box in your Zoom control panel and we'll do our best to answer those at the end of the talk. If you like a question someone else has asked and would like it to be answered, please use the upvoting tool, which is the little thumbs up symbol next to the question itself. This session will be recorded, but we will not be recording any video or audio input from the audience. You may contact UTS at science.future@uts.edu.au to discuss any concerns or questions you may have. Ok, so onto today's speakers, our first speaker today is Professor David Suchet. Dave is a highly cited marine biologist interested in understanding how coral and how environments and climate shape the form and function of coral reef ecosystems. Professor in the Climate Change Cluster at UTS, Dave increasingly works alongside industry and tourism sectors to improve reef management and practices and, his work was recognised in 2020 with a UTS Medal for research impact.
Following Dave, we'll hear from Dr Emma Kamp. Emma is an award-winning and internationally renowned coral expert who is passionate about both the protection of coral reefs and the involvement of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We'll, then hear from Mel Edwards. Mel is the director of the Executive MBA program at the UTS Business School and also the research director at the Centre for Business and Sustainable Development. She researches and teaches about sustainability, sustainable enterprise and responsible management, as well as complexity theory and social impact. Her work draws across disciplines with an overarching aim to understand how people organize, learn and adapt to enable sustainable transitions. Our fourth speaker today is Jonny Gaskill with an early career focus in marine life education, Jonny completed not one but two bachelor's degrees in marine science and education, leading to the publication of a number of books and digital resources. In more recent years, Jonny shifted his focus to the protection of coral reefs while working and living in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Applying his knowledge of coral reefs throughout the Great Barrier Reef, he's then co-ordinated a number of local reef recovery initiatives and aims to use his observations to determine the best possible actions that will be needed to be taken to help preserve coral in the Whitsundays. I'll now hand over to our first speaker, Professor David Target.
Thank you, Lucy. It gives me great pleasure to initiate this series of brief presentations by really asking the question and answering the question why reef restoration? What makes it viable for management and why has it become such a hot topic for us that have been researching and working on coral reefs for decades and really to answer those questions we really need to place ourselves in the situation that reefs are facing increasingly by the day. We now know that coral reef futures are increasingly dire under climate change unless we can limit warming to well below one and a half degrees and consequently efforts to manage reefs using existing platforms, which typically comprise protection of areas but also mitigation of local threats, are simply not enough to stem the tide of increasing climate pressures. And this particular problem is not lost on the nearly half a billion people that are dependent on coral reefs to survive. And you only have to go as far as Indonesia. This example here really demonstrates how local communities, local subsistence communities have really had to take action into their own hands to rebuild reefs that have been decimated by blast fishing. So whilst this isn't an example from climate change, it is an example from climate change related processes, overpopulation and simply unsustainable use of reefs. And quite simply, in this case, protection of reefs just simply loses the very values that reefs bring to local communities.
The same kind of context really applies in Australia, where our reefs have unprecedented cultural and ecological value. But importantly, they also have an economic value, and that economic value is largely driven by reef tourism. And so about three or four years ago, the same idea where we were rapidly losing reefs in front of our eyes and the local communities simply wanted to have more power to support stewardship based activities, to rebuild the reefs in real-time and really rehabilitate and maintain the good parts of the reef. So this is an example here where we've been working with reef tourism, launching a program called the Coral Nurture Program, and this was really to try and galvanize momentum amongst industry to play a part in rebuilding reefs and securing not just their own industry values, but, of course, the ecological values of the reef. All of these efforts, whether they are from subsistence fishing or whether they're from tourism industries again has not been lost on the global community and actually this has been a hugely facilitated in the last year or so through the UN, who launched the ecosystem, the decade of ecosystem restoration that started in June this year. And importantly, the idea is to start galvanizing all of this accelerating action worldwide, where local communities are really working hard to preserve their own reef systems on their doorstep. And importantly, this is also to try and similarly collate and align a lot of the interest in investing into these reef restoration activities, whether it's from governments or corporate foundations.
And collectively, the action and investment can start to build a much more coherent picture with which the success of restoration can be executed. So when we talk about reef restoration, however, it's not as simple necessarily as just planting coral. And consequently, I think the term reef restoration is quite often synonymised or confused, if you like, with sort of antiquated approaches to try and garden the reef. And what we actually have now is this huge diversity of tools that are developing, whether it's in the in the top left hand side of this slide through new structures to help consolidated, to help consolidate reef or whether it's in the right hand side, really working with the fact that corals not only reproduce by fragmenting and asexually growing, but also they sexually reproduce via larvae every year. All of these different methods can play a role in a part in this sort of more collective approach to restoring our coral reefs. So really, we're turning to the initial question that we asked, and how is reef restoration a viable management option? Well, there's really four simple ingredients to this. And actually, Emma, Mel and Johnny will really take you on a journey through these four steps. But really, just to outlay these, the first is we need scale. And quite simply, this means we need practices that are easy to adopt and also the finance routes that are straightforward to enable that adoption to deliver scale.
They, of course, have to be viable. They have to deliver what we term ecosystem service outcomes to ensure what we do actually carries a benefit to not just the stakeholders, but the ecosystem itself. And importantly, an action that we've really understood very well in recent years is that it's got to be proactive. By working together, we can actually start to make a difference, just like climate change as a collective problem. Restoration is a collective aid. And then finally, what's critical and Lucy mentioned this at the beginning is that the reef restoration process itself is not a replacement for management. It's a tool that can augment under the right circumstances to make a difference. And all of this has collectively come together as an example recently through our Coral Nurture program, where we demonstrated in recent years because of COVID 19 and tourism downturns that actually tourism industry that's equipped with capacity to rehabilitate the reefs through coral propagation and other restoration type tools can actually retain their asset values, their trained staff and be resilient to future uncertainty. So with that in mind, I'm now going to pass to Emma, and Emma will start to explain some of the scientific processes that we need in place to ensure that we can deliver these these facets.
Thank you, Dave, and I'm going to be speaking today about what the role is of science in the restoration space. Now, a lot of restoration activities have been around for decades, and have often been initiated by practitioners with less involvement from science. But as climate change and biodiversity loss increases around the globe, we are understanding that whilst we fundamentally have to address climate change, that alone is unlikely to be enough and that we also need to use nature-based solutions and start to restore nature to give the best chance of surviving through the future. So that means that we need science involved in this process to ensure that we are utilizing nature and its most efficient form to ensure it has the best chance to build its resilience to future change. So we can think then, that science got three key roles that it can play within the restoration space, first and foremost, is protection. Then it's to actually look at how we restore what are the different methods that make most sense for the local site that we're looking at. And importantly, then knowing that the climate is going to continue to change, the environment is dynamic, and there will be unforeseen impacts as well as foreseen impacts, how can we best prepare this system to have the best chance of future survival and the collective effort of all of this, and really where science is key, is that it wants to maximize success of the efforts that are being undertaken.
And that's really important. We need to understand what is success, because success at one site may not be the same as success at another site, and an example for this could be if there's a ship grounding or some local damage, there may be a very small area that needs to be restored. If a certain area has lost a certain species, then then rehabilitating that one species is very different to say, what we're seeing for areas on the Great Barrier Reef where because of coral bleaching, we've lost quite large areas of reef that requires a different approach. And so this is where science can come in to try and tailor what is needed to maximize the success. And that's ultimately ensuring that the ecosystem has gone back to a state where it has its ecosystem function, the biodiversity and the resilience to future change. So, in protection then, one of the big things that science can do is help us to understand when and where we should protect. We can see three very different reefs seascapes here. One of them is likely beyond repair and it's, you know, there's there's no coral there, it's very, it's not an obvious flat area where we can look at, say, something like larval seeding. And given the effort and energy to look into restoration, we have to be very strategic over the areas where we intervene. On the other side of the spectrum, there are reefs that are still amazingly diverse and have great coral cover. And again, here it wouldn't be appropriate necessarily to intervene because nature is doing well. But in between those, we have sites where there is available space for things like outplanting corals or larval seeding that could use benefit from restoration efforts. So a key part of science is choosing when and where we intervene.
Next, then we have to understand, we picked our site, but what is the best method to use? And Dave touched on a few of these, and it's really highly variable depending on the needs of the sites. So there can be things like larval seeding, where the larval slick is collected and could be transferred to a site where actually there isn't enough natural stock to support natural recovery. Then if there are, say, certain species that needed to be targeted, that's where actually having in-situ nurseries can be really beneficial. So you can then target the individuals that you want to grow up so you can see at the bottom of the screen there's some corals growing up in nursery frames. And this is something that the coral nuture program has been using successfully out in the Great Barrier Reef. And then in some locations, if there isn't available substrate or, for example, after a cyclone, there could be a lot of rubble, then having a structure such as the middle top, you can see where there are actually spiders or frames that can help consolidate the substrate can help provide a base for coral attachment. So again, understanding with practitioners the needs of the sites and in tailoring the scientific and innovative solutions to do that is again another way that science can get involved and contribute to the restoration space.
A really crucial thing that we have to do within the science space is to choose what corals and where we source them from. So this is just a really simplified view of biodiversity. We've got branching corals. We've got boulder corals. And what we choose has different functions to the reef when we out-plant them. Branching corals produce a great 3D structure for fish habitats, but they're more susceptible to storm damage. Whereas the slower, grow, boulder corals may provide less structural complexity, but it may be more resilient to future change. So understanding which corals we out-plant can impact the biodiversity and the functioning of the reef, and that's something we need to understand through the science is what we should be choosing. And also then where those corals come from. So there's two examples here. There are natural sources of broken corals that we can utilize, and that just rebuilds the populations that are naturally there. But again, as mentioned before, we can start to select individual species, build these up, and that gives us a greater abundance and stocks we're not having to take from the environment. Now in these two pictures here, both of those have 100 percent coral cover, but one of them is a monoculture of the same coral species, whereas the other has many different species.
And so again, understanding what we out-plant and where is really important to ensure that we are producing a biodiverse reef that has the functions such as storm protection, such as housing for fishes that we need to ensure the reef's viability. The final thing then to touch on is that we need to ensure the reefs are persisting into the future. We have yet to deal with climate change, and there's a variety of different approaches that are being considered to try and ensure reefs have the best viable future. So this can be things like actually selecting the most tolerant corals from the reef, super corals for example, building these up in nurseries and out planting those. It can be relocating corals from, you know, more tolerant areas to less tolerant areas to boost that resilience and then exploring things like probiotics, synthetic biology and looking at naturally trying to assist the evolution of corals to give them the best chance in the future. All of these have different costs and risks associated with them, which we have to consider when implementing them. And on that note, I'm going to pass over to Mel, who's going to talk to us about some of the costs and things that we have to think about, ensuring that there's a sustainable approach to financing reef restoration activities.
I'm very pleased to be here and be part of this discussion. This is some early stage work that I've been doing in collaboration with colleagues in the business school, particularly Dr Deb Cotton. You might be wondering actually why the business community and why do we have business academics involved in this discussion around reef restoration? And as I'm going to explain in my presentation very briefly, reef restoration and biodiversity restoration more broadly is a risk for everyone. As Dave said at the beginning, it's a collective issue and therefore it requires collective solutions. But more importantly, you know, climate and biodiversity risk are becoming an increasingly material risk for the business and investment community. And so businesses are increasingly understanding their interdependency with the system and their safe habitat for operating business is important, and therefore they have a responsibility to both pay for the crisis and mitigate risk, but also to contribute towards the solutions in terms of restoration. And as we will also see the risk turning into responsibility is important not only just for businesses, but for society, more broadly and for the economy. So what do I mean by this? Well, the first thing we need to do is understand that the reef and ecosystems more broadly have a value. Now, some people might be really concerned when they see dollar signs on nature, particularly for those of us who might think this means nature or the environment can be put up for sale. But in the business way of thinking about valuation of natural capital, there's been a long history of understanding the contribution that these sometimes undervalued ecosystem services play in contributing to our very basic economic activities.
So there've been a number of different studies over many years that have looked at valuing ecosystems. In particular, the ones up here and the numbers I have on-screen relate to a couple of studies that have looked at the Great Barrier Reef in particular and the figures here from a study from Deloitte Economics. Also the total valuation of the reef in terms of its social and economic value mirrors a figure that was previously determined by Oxford Economics. So let me just take you briefly through what we have here. So there's a number of different ways of doing this valuation. One is to actually value the ecosystems themselves for their value that they contribute, and there are methods for doing this, but they have not been as well integrated into the business community. The ones that have been well integrated relate to what we might consider ESG or environmental, social and governance factors being implemented or embedded within economic and financial ways of determining the value of materials and also services. So in this case, we've got the direct economic value of reef activity could be valued at around $6.4 billion to the Australian economy, this takes into account the scientific and research community that we've just been discussing now, as well as the tourism activity, commercial fishing and aquaculture, recreational activities more broadly and also across the board of these activities. That's roughly equivalent to 64000 jobs, and that's pre-pandemic. Another way of looking at that is a much broader valuation, which you can see with the price tag over here on the reef of $56 billion.
Now this valuation takes into account not only those direct values that we draw from the use of and our direct benefit of the reef, but also the kind of social value as an iconic heritage site. What that means for future generations and what people, even if they wouldn't go to the reef or visit the reef, put a price on the value of that reef as an iconic value for Australia. So you can see that the reef does certainly have economic value. But as we know and as our science colleagues have been telling us, this value is being eroded and this is why it's very important for the business community and for the sustainable finance and investing community in particular, to work closely with scientists to understand where the big opportunities, not just from a risk perspective, but where are the opportunities to redirect finance for the types of projects that will have the most benefit, both in terms of restoration of the reef, but also in terms of that social and economic development in those local communities whose livelihoods are dependent upon a healthy and functioning reef. So we also know that this opportunity is something that investors are looking for. So there is a movement in the finance and investment community towards sustainable investing RIAA in their recent report, where they looked at the thematic concerns for investors.
So where do investors want to see their money go? The main thematic concern was still climate. However, 21 per cent of people said that the investment in natural capital of the kind that we're discussing here is an important consideration for where they would like to see their money going so we can see that there is an opportunity. But to date, most of the funding that has gone towards projects of ecosystem restoration, more broadly ocean conservation and in this case, reef restoration still comes from philanthropic sources from funds, grants, donations, sponsorships and endowments and government funding. These are really important mechanisms, and there are a lot of really wonderful initiatives that have been able to benefit from these sources of funding. But the problem remains that we have a gap between those funding sources and the total amount of capital that is required to restore the reef now, and also in the future going forward, if we can't mitigate some of the more dramatic effects of climate. So where are these solutions going to come from? And we know that for large scale investment to move into activities like reef restoration, there needs to be scale of viable, you know, reef activities that investors still look for a return on their investments. So this is necessary. So there might be some opportunities within reef restoration for this, and this is something that we're exploring in our research, not only just to understand the loss and mitigating the risk. Currently, there are instruments that are developed from banks, for example, and the insurance sector to ensure that in an event of crisis, risks can actually be insured.
But we also want to think about what are the restoration opportunities and how can we think about the multiplier effect of investing into reef restoration for that economic activity more broadly? But perhaps it's not always the big solutions that we need to be looking at, and it is a complex picture. So as you know, both of our scientists have told us, the solutions are small scale as well, and there is an opportunity to look at these small scale opportunities and to then think about the way that they can generate the livelihood of that reef. The business models that are being used by these smaller operatives are not necessarily the same as we might see in the corporate or business sector. There is an opportunity here to explore social enterprises, for example, where the revenues generated can be put back into the reef restoration activities or put back into the science and also stay within the local communities. There's opportunities to develop partnerships with the local tourism providers so that they can understand the science as well, work with scientists, work with those tourists and develop a partnership approach to looking at sustainable development of reef restoration. And on that note, I'm going to hand over to Johnny, who is going to talk us through some of these exciting activities that are happening at the moment up in the Whitsunday area.
Thanks, Mel. Well, good afternoon everybody to World Science Day. Following on from what Mel was just saying, I've been working on a couple of projects here in the Whitsundays, where the collaboration with local community and tourism operators, traditional owners has been really the most important factor in ensuring that these projects continue on. So as the Reef Islands Initiative Coordinator I've been looking at some of the old, some of the projects that have been underway over the last couple of years and then are working on a few new exciting initiatives in the future, working with tourism operators, community and even tourists. There's been obviously a lot of changes in the Great Barrier Reef and living in the Whitsundays on a little small island on the western side of those islands, you can see there, Daydream Island over the last seven years, I've been able to see a lot of changes, some good changes, some recovery. But the most significant was certainly the impact from the six to seven metre cyclonic waves that came from Cyclone Debbie. On this map here, you can see any of those green areas that hit the edge of the islands where the fringing reefs were, we lost. We went from about 70 to 80 per cent coral cover down to five to eight per cent coral cover. And unfortunately, these were the exposed sites. They were the sites that are generally good for coral growth and have healthy coral reefs, and they were also our primary tourism sites.
So over the next couple of years, we did see some recovery, but it's been very slow. The impact you can see here, this is where I was living one of my favourite little spots to jump in each night and hang out with the fish. It went from about an 80 per cent coral cover reef. This is a reef flat, so it's a bit more soft coral. But there's also branching corals a little bit deeper at the site to an algae garden. And it still looks like that today, and it just demonstrates the power of the waves. This photo here not only did it take out soft corals, which are fairly tough and hardy, but it even was able to damage the body tissue of corals that remained in place to the point where they weren't able to survive. So that, as well as the fact that we have some water quality issues in the Whitsundays, has been a big challenge for the region to recover. You can see there on the left, this is pre cyclone because I wanted to show even pre cyclone the water quality issues locally were there. It's not just a result of the cyclone washing a whole heap of sediment down, which is down the rivers into the area, which did happen. There's been a build up of sediment and high nutrients for many, many years for a number of reasons land clearing, dredging and vegetation loss, even on the islands as well.
So the problem now is these reefs are really struggling to recover on their own. On the right there, you can see Daydream Island, the western side reef covered in branching aquapora, and there's some plate corals in there as well. It was about 70 percent coral cover. And then last year, which is the same as what it's like today, it's really undergone a complete phase shift to an algal garden. And those areas where Coral would normally recruit, where the algae isn't, they're covered in turf algae and sediment. So it's making it extremely hard for these areas to recover. Another limitation, unfortunately, we have experienced in the Whitsundays was last year we had the first bleaching event that I'd witnessed in the eight years that I've been here during was actually during COVID, so not many people actually got out to see it. But living on the island, we were able to get around and survey a number of the hard corals sites that remained after Cyclone Debbie, and there was about an 80 per cent bleaching rate in hard coral cover. And some of you may not have seen many photos during this bleaching event in Whitsundays, because there was barely anyone out there. Technically was locked down, but this was work, so we were able to whizz around and check the sites.
We did see recovery. Luckily, there was a storm that came through in March that you can see on the graph where water temperature dropped dramatically, but it took about four weeks for those corals to start to recover after the temperature dropped below the 30 degree mark in the water. So there was some coral mortality and had the storm come through a week later, we may have lost a higher percentage, and there is only a few of these hard coral dominant sites left in the Whitsundays at the moment. So the projects we started working on after realising that maybe we need to intervene here, look at the recovery is so limited, there's so many impacts that are hindering recovery naturally. A few projects started in 2019. The project I led was the ex-situ nurseries on Daydream Island, and these were the first ex-situ nurseries with a primary focus of restoration in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The goal here was to involve tourists, so because it was out of the water, tourists are actually able to come onto the island and be part of the propagation process. The in-situ nurseries at Hook Island, they were put in the water at the same time, and Emma touched on some of the in-situ nurseries and the techniques around that method of restoration. This involved the local community, so this was trying to get the local community and more invested in restoration through volunteering.
And more recently, we have a larval reseeding project underway here at the moment, with AIMS and Southern Cross University as part of the Reef Islands Initiative. And this is using the tourism operators and traditional owners. So by trying to invest in tourists, getting involved, the community get involved, the tourism operators and the traditional owners. We're hoping that this will allow these projects to go or remain ongoing. I'm just going to go into a little bit of detail not too long on some of the projects so you can get a bit of a case study on how they work. Emma was mentioning super corals as well during their presentation, the donor corals for the Daydream Island ex-situ nurseries are taken from the marina there. That was the only area in the mall group or around Daydream Island, where no corals were impacted by the cyclone. So the marina actually helped us in that way, and because the water's warmer inside the marine and the corals are much more resilient and hopefully can do or recover or sustain longer in a changing climate. Getting the tourists involved so you can see there bottom left, some of the tourists were able to get involved. The Daydream Island continues to run these tours. It's a free tour where guests to the island can come and learn about coral restoration and get involved in the propagation process, working with one of the marine biologists on board.
And just this is an example of why we do it. Coral reefs do naturally recover on their own. It does take a long time, but the struggle around these inshore islands, with the added impacts of water quality and also the impacts of bleaching, we are seeing much slower recovery on the left there. You can see that that control bommie that's going with Daydream Island is covered in algae and then on the right you can see the out-plants that have come from the nursery. Hopefully, the idea is that the out-plants continue to grow, block the light from where the algae is growing and then slowly will start to get grazing herbivores back with fish that eat the algae and start to phase shift that back to a coral reef. Because this bommie was completely covered in coral pre cyclone, and four years later, they're still showing very limited recruitment. In-situ nurseries, I won't go too much into too much detail and or into limited detail on these, but basically they're ex-situ nurseries in-situ in the water, collecting corals attaching to cement discs, and they're out-planting them onto the reef and the out-planting process involved members of the community during this project. Larval reseeding project is really getting these tourism operators involved, and the project we're working on locally is called Boats for Coral, and that's using tourism operator boats to do the work.
So inviting tourism operators to come out and the way it works is you collect coral spawn after the coral spawn slick forms on the top of the water. The tourism boats go around with buckets and nets, collect the spawn and put them into these larval pools, and they stay there for six days or so, and then the eggs hatch, form into larvae, develop into larvae and then they're deployed on to damage reef. So you can see here we've involved the traditional owners this year, which has been great. Some of the owners came down and did a smoke ceremony to welcome the tourism operators to their region and there's five traditional owners that have been coming out and are staying on the mother ship with us at the end of this month. So that will mean that the traditional owners are totally involved and will actually become part of the project. A lot of these traditional owners haven't been back to country for a long time, so they're coming down from north of Townsville to their country that they haven't seen, which is amazing. The tourism operator involvement you can see down the bottom here, it's ocean rafting, one of the tourism operators driving along. That's Professor Peter Harrison at the front is collecting coral spawn, and then top right Redcape is moving the coral, the larval pools around to deploy them onto the reef.
And you can see that at the bottom of how that process works. So these early projects, these three early projects using or working with operators, community groups and everyone locally has been one of the driving forces of the Whitsunday Reef Islands initiative. And we had a workshop earlier this year and brought everyone together. Basically discuss what worked, what didn't. Looked at the baseline mapping data that was produced by University of Queensland, which is where that cyclone map came from, and determine which sites would be the ideal sites for restoration based on water quality, the likelihood of cyclones coming through and damaging it again, and which sites are less likely to recover on their own because of poor connectivity as larval sinks. So we are at the stage now where we're getting, you know, getting a lot of information that's helping guide restoration in the future locally. But at the end of the day, it's really these sites that are unable to recover that we're focusing on and trying to work with everyone. So hopefully it can be sustainable. And this is, just thought I'd put a picture of plaque. This is one of the sites from the top side of that island where the fringing is that's been totally wiped out, almost totally wiped out by the waves came from Cyclone Debbie. And that is me. Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you so much, Johnny. And thank you very much to all of our presenters today. What a fascinating and inspiring set of talks. So just a reminder we're now going to move into the Q&A section and we've already received some fantastic questions through the Q&A function. If you'd still like to submit a question, please feel free to do so using the Q&A chat. I'm now going to ask all of our presenters to come back on screen and we'll tackle some of these, these great questions that have come through today. So Emma, I'm going to ask you the first one, one that came through from our initial registration. You touched on this a little bit before about the super corals and transplanting. And Johnny, you just mentioned it about the marina and the waters being warmer. But the question that we've received is is it possible to transplant more robust corals from outside Australia, from other coral reefs and transplant them onto the reef in Australia? So in theory, it could be possible, but there's a lot of complexities, even moving corals within a reef in different locations within a reef itself. So the first thing there's international permits, things to think about and then beyond that, just the biology itself. The corals are really well adapted to the environment that they're raised in, and that's one of the reasons that they're so successful. So we often find that even moving corals locally, things like the natural differences in light, the sedimentation can impact things like the bacteria, the type of algae that associate with the coral, and all of that affects how well it survives. So although it's not impossible at this stage, it's something that is probably highly unlikely, and the efforts would more be looking at locally which corals are there that could be potentially moved that are already resilient within the location where they found. Fantastic. Thank you, Emma and Johnny, an extension of that question from one of our audience members. Do corals establish more effectively when the larva are captured than they would naturally. It was one of those slides that you explained about all of the different ways that you're using restoration practices.
Yeah. So I guess the individual larvae that manages to get to a suitable surface, it would be, it's probably the same. There's no there's no advantage of captive larvae. But when you capture or when you consolidate the eggs and you have 3000, you know, we deployed three million larvae last week. When you have that much larvae consolidated onto one area, you just got a much higher chance of survival. When coral spawns, that spawn sits as a slick on the top. And if it escapes the mouth of a little damselfish or a little herring or something that's whizzing around trying to eat everything or doesn't get washed out to sea where there's no suitable site, the chance of it settling is about one in a million. Through the larval reseeding project, it's about one in 10000. It reduces the odds or increases the odds of survival and reduces the odds of getting eaten by someone else.
Absolutely. Thank you, Jonny. And Mel, I'm going to come to you now. We've received some really great questions about the economy around the reef, one that we've received during registration. How does, you mentioned about the value in that staggering figure of fifty six billion dollars of our reef systems and value? So have you got an idea or can you give the audience indication how the destruction of the coral reef is affecting Australia's economy? Well, that's a really great question. And you know, obviously we haven't got that modelling at hand, especially in recent times, given the pandemic effects that have happened to the sort of the tourism activity. But certainly, the mitigation tells us that there is a need for some financial instruments to be set up to insure against the damage to the risk to the reef. And that's kind of been the main way that that has been valued in financial terms. Yeah, great. And Dave, coming to you now. So with ocean warming happening and a number of these other stresses facing coral reefs, is ocean warming the greatest threat at the moment, would you say? And what is the current status of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef?
Well, obviously climate change is an incredibly hot topic at the moment with COP26, and I think this has really helped highlight the messaging that unless we limit warming not just to under 1.5 degrees, but really limiting it as much as possible, it really is going to be catastrophic for reefs. They've already changed well beyond recognition from, say, 30 years ago through repeat heatwave events, and those heatwave events are driven by ocean warming. So in other words, we have these increasingly frequent but more intense thermal events during summer, which is already at the upper limits for many of our corals to grow and grow well. And that's obviously pushing these mass bleaching events and in turn, driving to mortality. So when we think about what has bleaching done to the Great Barrier Reef are really again, very timely question. A paper was released just yesterday that demonstrated only two percent of all corals on the Great Barrier Reef have escaped bleaching in the last 30 years. So it really paints the picture now that that all corals on the Great Barrier Reef at some point have been touched by climate change. And just how severe it can be. Now, importantly, corals can recover from bleaching if given a chance if it's not severe enough in terms of intensity or duration, corals can recover, but of course, these climate events are making those events just so intense. So to come back to the question, yes, solving heating is our biggest challenge. We have to solve that if we're going to have reefs in the future. But really, the point we're trying to make with restoration is that any activity to help rebuild biomass and rebuild it quickly beyond natural recovery gives us that extra time to be able to solve climate change because clearly it's in the hands of the policymakers at the moment, which makes it very uncertain.
Absolutely. A wonderful question that I wanted to ask too, and is coming through is how can people get involved in these fantastic programs? Johnny, you mentioned about the tourism, the tourists in the Whitsundays, but all of our speakers have spoken about the incredibly diverse teams that contribute to these efforts. Is there a way for volunteers or visitors or students to participate or contribute to the work that you're doing?
Yeah, luckily, that that certainly is, I guess, from a community point of view, going out with a high standard tourism operator. There's a lot of those that are involved in coral restoration throughout the whole of the Great Barrier Reef, but even locally in the Whitsundays, you have a lot of these operators that are involved, you know, they have it on their website and you can see how you can be involved. As far as students can be involved, some of the operators are looking for students to come on board and be part of it. I know for the larval reseeding project, we're looking at taking a few students out on in a couple of weeks, the trip out to down the mother ship. So there's definitely opportunity there, but you know, the best way to find out is to come to the reef. Go out with an operator. Have a look. Talk to people in different regions because it's different everywhere, and you can normally get your answer on site.
Fantastic, Johnny, thank you, so I guess the best place to be to go for our audience would be to your website for the program and maybe submit an inquiry there.
Yeah, if anyone had any questions, that's really ideal.
So wonderful. Emma, Dave, was there anything that you wanted to add to give for potential university students and how they might get involved in studying or participating in this type of research?
I wasn't sure whether where I would jump in first, but now that I've unmuted, I'll jump in very quickly and just say that, you know, a lot of our research within future reefs for example, we still really focus on the core biology of corals, and that's critical because we need to more, you know, more than ever, we need to understand how they grow, how the environment shapes that and how we can therefore propagate coral. So a lot of our research actually has moved from that sort of core understanding to its applied understanding. And so many of our students that join the program undertake fundamental science, but it's embedded within the actual industry activity. So that's a great way in which many students coming into the system can get involved and actually make a difference through the research on the front line, which is really important not just for them but for us.
Fantastic. Thank you. Mel, another question for you and a common one that we've received both in registration and live today is how can we make a difference as consumers? How can individuals either invest in sustainable finance or make consumer choices that would help support some of the initiatives that you were talking about? Yeah, I mean, it's such a great question, and there are so many different ways that I could answer this, especially when we've just talked about the complexity, right, and the interdependency between these ecosystems. So there's kind of like really direct ways. And then there's sort of indirect ways of doing that, but certainly the most direct way that most people can do if you've got superannuation, then you have the ability to be able to decide where your superannuation funds go. Then you certainly choose a sustainable portfolio or ask your, you know, ask the person managing your superannuation if they can help you with this decision. So it can be a complex decision, but that's what those services are there for. And, you know, in terms of the broader question as well that you asked about students getting involved, I would say if anyone is here from the business student community, it's really important to understand and understand the science, speak to scientists. I mean, you know, this isn't the beginning of a collaboration that we've been working on with C-3, and I've learnt so much as a business academic being involved in this. But even in the business school, it's understanding sustainable finance and what it is putting your bright minds towards, you know, the type of modelling that's required to answer the question that you asked me up-front, about how can we understand climate effects on the damages to these ecosystems and particularly in the context of a post-pandemic world? These are questions, and we want all the smart minds we can possibly get working on them. Absolutely. And that's something I've certainly taken away from today that it would require such a diversity of thought and perspective and experience that if we're going to solve these big problems and create innovations and solutions, we need to have everyone involved in this. So that leaves an open question to everyone, really, which is this really delicate balance when we're talking about these very complex ecosystems, the help versus harm question. When do you know when it's the right time to intervene? No one wants to take this? Dave.
I'll jump in just to initiate some response because it is a huge topic. I think it's multilayered as well in terms of the answers and so on. I can touch on some and no doubt everyone else will have additional thoughts. But you know, when do we do more harm? Well, at this stage, I think most people, whether it's scientists or stakeholders, are of the mindset that it's better to do something for nothing. You know, our only options, you know, to some extent at the moment are lobbying to reduce climate emissions. So to many as well, that's very unsatisfying in the sense that we need also some immediate alternative actions to make a difference. However, restorations are really, really young fields, not just for reefs, but for forests or for mangroves or for seagrass. So we still don't actually know the answers as to how well our activities are ultimately making a difference to the ecology and to society. Now, having said that, a lot of our really early efforts already showed that we are improving coral biomass. We're improving diversity, but we're only able to achieve that through a really scientifically rigorous process. So again, some of that scientific rigorous process is identifying actually, there are points where we don't want to restore reefs, and Emma really made some great points about that and understanding the local ecologies and the and the local use of the reef. And ultimately, we shouldn't be looking at restoring every single reef. So it's making targeted decisions. So in terms of harm versus help, at this point in time, we certainly are helping. But the question is to what extent.
And I imagine, as you said, it takes all lots of different changes, lots of different factors, lots of different levers to be pulled in order to tackle such a complex question.
Absolutely.
Emma, did you want to jump in as well? Yeah. Just to add to that, I think some of the innovative techniques I touched on, a lot of those are in an, you know, an R&D stage at the moment. And that's because we ultimately need to start to test them to be able to get to that answer. Is it going to work? Is it going to do more harm than good? Because it's like a portfolio. It's like a toolbox of approaches and not one of them is going to be the solution to everything. But again, as Dave pointed out, to addressing climate change and lobbying is kind of the biggest tool that we have, but we know that that's not enough at the moment. So again, by exploring this portfolio, we can say, OK, these ones work, these ones don't. This is how we can improve them. But the bottom line is that we need that information and that science, so that if we get to a point where the only option is to throw everything at it, we have this information in this scientific backing to say, OK, actually, this is the best way that we can implement that and that will help reduce the risk. And you know, for context, when we do these activities, there's a rigorous process. There's permitting, there are discussions, there is a risk mindset that's put into place when we go into this. So again, an example would be if we're going to move corals between locations and we are allowed to do that. You think about things about when is when are they reproductively active and should we move them back before they are spawning? So all of these things are being considered so that we kind of iteratively minimize the risk to maximize a positive outcome from our activities.
Awesome. Thank you, Emma, and I'm just going to stay with you and then anyone else who wants to jump in on this as well? Just getting into the nitty gritty, then when you're doing this work, we've received a great question online, which is when a coral is bleached, I think this is speaking to your choice of where to go and the intervention or choosing. The question is when a coral is bleached, is the coral left on the reef or is it removed to make space for new corals? So I think they've kind of touched in this area, but the really important thing is just because the corals bleach doesn't necessarily mean that it's died at that point in time. So if the stress isn't prolonged, then the coral may recover. So just because it's bleached, we definitely wouldn't remove it or anything. At that point in time, we would hope that it may naturally recover. Now, if it doesn't, then it obviously still produces that 3D structure that forms the reef. And so we would try to naturally use that substrate for the different techniques we've discussed. Now in some cases, that may mean that there actually isn't the best substrate available for restoration, and there could be then discussion to have as to whether or not that needs to be manipulated. But at the moment, rather than actually removing that or changing that, we just changed the type of technique we would implement. So, for example, using a star that would go over that to produce a more favorable environment for the space. So the key is that structure it leaves is still kind of important for new coral to potentially recruit onto. Fantastic. Look we, we're really short of time now and I'm sorry, I have received so many fantastic questions and we haven't been able to get them all through today. But I would like to thank you all the panelists today for such an exciting talk and a really wonderful opportunity to learn more about the incredible impact that your work and your collaboration is having to protect these incredible ecosystems. So lastly, for our audience, if you would like to learn more, we are going to, sorry, let me just bring up this last slide so you can see this information. Here we go. We'll be sending a copy of today's talk as long as well as the Q&A session to everyone who registered, and it will also be on our website very soon. So if you've got any other questions been spoken about today, you can get them through the participant's websites and we wish you a very happy World Science Day and thank you for joining us.
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Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to UTS Science in Focus, which is a public free lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. I'm Professor Bradley Williams, Associate Dean, external and international engagement and I'll be the moderator for today's event. Part of my role is to collect the audience's questions and pose them to our speakers at the end of the, at the end of the talks. Our Science in Focus talks provide an outstanding platform for UTS academics and public participants to meet for the sharing of ideas and to shine a spotlight on some of the top of the line work we're doing at the Faculty of Science at UTS. Not only are we pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge by making new and substantial contributions to a fundamental understanding of the world around us, but we have a dedication and devotion to translate our work into real world impact. Today, we will hear from one of our UTS experts making major contributions to our knowledge and understanding of newer and easy, easy to use tests for SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID 19. We will also learn about the rollercoaster ride of one of Australia's largest private pathology companies and how Covid affected them, too. Before I introduce our speakers for today, I'd like to acknowledge on behalf of everyone here present the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose ancestral lands the UTS City campus now stands. I would also like to pay respects to the elders, both past and present, acknowledging, acknowledging them as the, the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land. I'd also like to recognise that the Cammeraygal people of the Guringai nation from which I joined today and the people and elders of the country from which you joined today.
Just a little housekeeping, and I will forward this slide. Before we get started, it is an online event and there have been some technical difficulties with Internet connectivity today. So if there are problems, please stay with us and we will resolve them as quickly as possible. If you have any questions during today's webinar, please use the Q&A function in the zoom and you'll find it as shown on the screen now. And you can then enter your question into that Q&A function. If you'd like, if you like a question that you've seen, you can always use the upvoting tool, which is the little thumbs up symbol next to the question itself. Now, this session will be recorded and it is recorded for our internal purposes, and it will be made available on the UTS website. We will not be recording any video or audio input from the audience. And you may contact us at the email address presented on this slide. If you have any concerns or questions about the recording. Our speakers today are Professor Dayong Jin of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at UTS and Mr. Anthony Friedli, who's the chief operating officer and chief executive officer of Australian Clinical Labs. And I will introduce now Professor Dayong Jin. Distinguished professor Dayong Jin is an award winning scientist and technology developer who is driving the transformation of photonics and materials into an analytical diagnostic and imaging devices for disease detection through interdisciplinary research teams. These devices identify early, early signs of disease and toxins to enable rapid detection of target cells and of specific molecules. He has won many prizes in recognition for his outstanding work, including the Australian Museum Eureka Prize and the Australian Prime Minister's prize for the physical scientist of the year. Dayong, I now invite you to give us your presentation. Thank you.
So thank you for the nice introduction. And thank you for all the participants in the audience today for attending my lecture today. As you may notice, the title from my lecture, part two. Why is it part two? Because at the end of last year, I presented on the same topic at the New South Wales chief scientist at breakfast seminar series. So that, on that lecture, I presented the basics of this technology and because the time, the time limit today in my lecture today, I'll be only focusing on the updated part. So you're welcome to visit the New South Wales chief scientist website and to watch my first presentation on this similar topic. So the topic today, as I said, I'll pretty much will be focusing on the new variants and it's challenging in terms of demanding the increasing number of the herd immunity in the vaccination rate. And the focus today will be pretty much on the past, on the rapid test. There is a dilemma here between the detection speed and detection sensitivity. So I'll show you the principle, how, actually, each of the test that works and then I'll bring you to the basic principle, how our UTS science solution works and how to make the signal can be optical, optically amplified. And in terms of the developing of a single molecule probe, which can be sensitive enough to detect a single molecule from the virus. At the close of my lecture, I will discuss the broad range of opportunities, including the manufacturing opportunity in Australia and the development of rapid and, you know, non-invasive saliva test.
And of course, there are challenges ahead associated with the new variants and also the clinical translation and TGA approval process. So as I already present a very similar picture, last lecture, but this way is more simplified version to show you, you know, how difficult to handle, you know, to conquer this virus. At the beginning of the pandemic, I remember a lot of public, they got confused between the difference, you know, between the bacteria and the virus. If you compare the size, you know, the bacteria is at least one order magnitude larger than the virus in diameter. But if you compare to the volume, you can see the volume, the virus is a tenth is a thousand times at least a thousand times smaller than the size of the, the bacteria in volume. Ok, so this Covid, SARS-2, they are tiny. You know, they are around 100 nanometre smaller than the optical diffraction limit. So they are very, very difficult to detect. The size and the shape is pretty much closer to the size of the traditional influenza and also the HIV virus. And that's the first challenge why this is so difficult to detect. Most importantly, this virus has a very long period of incubation time inside the host people, you know, like people got infected. In the beginning of the infection because the number of virus load is still small enough, so in the first couple of days, we call it a latent period, the host person doesn't pass on the virus to the other, other people because the number of viruses are very low.
But this virus, they can duplicate themselves very quickly inside our human sell at a rate about, you know, three order magnitude virus in every 10 hours. So in the later couple of days, you know, the host, the people who get infected will become infectious. But there's a long window, this window, we call it incubation window, the time between the onset of the infectiousness and a time between and also the time till the patient get to, start to show their symptoms. So this window is a fairly long, you know, actually can last for several days and up to two weeks. And this window is pretty dangerous because the host people has no idea whether he or she got the infection and where and when they got infected. But they're already passing on the virus to people around him or her. More or less, the patient starts to show the symptom, we're traditionally using this, you know, conventional gold standard technology called PCR. But you understand you're only getting the results within like, you know, a day or two. So this has become quite slow. So the entire window for understanding and detecting this virus is fairly long, can take about a couple of weeks. Ok, so this is a very, very challenging problem for this virus. And because this is a long black window, we've got no idea, you know, who is the host, who got infected? Ok. And particular when the number the COVID case number is above 100 - you know, this is the particular truth in last, in the current pandemic lockdown in Sydney, in New South Wales. At the beginning, you know, even at around 100 new cases, daily new cases, there are about, you know, at least half of the people who have no idea when he got the infected and they're still spreading the virus in the community. But now, nowadays, you know, today I heard a number is above 900 cases. So more than 80 to 90 percent of the patients they got, they have no idea, you know. We don't, we don't, we couldn't trace these people so that because the cases, they never get linked. So this is a completely, you know, annoying problem to control the spreading of this virus. And the next challenge is, you know, the virus getting smarter. You know, they they genetically, you know, improve themselves and they become smarter. And you can see, you know, from the original strand to the Alpha, Beta and the Gamma, now this we are handling you know, we're coping with the Delta variant, and they are smarter and smarter.
So you can see each wave, at least where we got it, we are in the process of the third wave. And you can see, you know, each wave they could become stronger and stronger. And because they are smarter and that, the infection, they they become more contagious. And there's a scientific number called the reproductive number. It's a parameter to measure how infectious each new each new strain virus they are. So at the original strand, you can see the R is close to 1.1, that means, if somebody got infected, they can pass on by average for only one person. Ok, so the spreading rate is a slower. Right, but once we move to the R Alpha phase, you know, the Alpha variants, the number is close to two. So that means, one, people getting infected can quickly pass on two, two to four, four to eight. So this is a power of two. And that's that means it's very quick. And now, why the Delta variant is so contentious? Because the R number is close to 3.4. So that means if one people get infected, at least three people by average will be infected, you know, getting the virus passed on and then three to nine, nine to 27. And that will be quickly spreading through the whole, you know, community. So this is a pretty, you know, dangerous situation that we are facing.
And accordingly, you know, in the beginning of the pandemic, we are expecting the vaccine and now the vaccine is ready. And, you know, we are predicting, you know, if, you know, 60 percent of the population getting the two shot of the jabs, and we could develop a herd immunity so we could control the spreading of the virus within our community. But now everything changed because the new variants. And you can see, you know, the the higher number of R value getting associated with the new, you know, variants and the requirement for the vaccination rate is getting higher and higher. At this stage, we need at least 80 percent of the population get vaccination until we could stop the spreading of the virus through our community. And this is a new update I got from the website, and you can see, you know, at this stage, unfortunately, Australia in a way in, you know, leave behind, you know, compared to the other major economy countries, including the Canada, US, European countries and Asian countries. So hopefully there will be some good news in the next two to three months time for our population, get at least 80 percent of the vaccination by two jabs. So this is a you know, unfortunately, this is the reality.
And, you know, I'm sorry to share in all of this shocking and bad news to start with my lecture, but there is some good news. Ok, so this is the good news. Why, you know, the virus can be cured easily. So how the virus can be cured, you know, by washing our hand, because if we are using the soap molecule, they have the hydrophilic head and have hydrophobic tail, the hydrophobic tail can insert onto the membrane of this virus. So the virus can be broken down into molecules. Ok, so this is a way, that's why we encourage our population to regularly wash our hands each time with soap for 20 seconds, at least 20 seconds. So once the molecules, once the virus breaks down into molecules, we have ways to detect them. And when you look at the detail of the construction of this virus, you can quickly understand, you know, what's the, where is the strategy? How can we detect them? So there are basically two strategies and two approaches. One is to detecting the oligo molecules, which is the RNA molecule inside the virus. Each virus only have one RNA molecule, OK. The second approach is you can detect in the proteins. So we call antigens, OK, at least the spike protein, they are very specific to the SARS-CoV-2 and nuclear proteins, they are specific to the coronavirus.
Ok, so then you can focus our detection to detecting these proteins. At least you have 26 copies of the spike proteins per virus, and you have 35 copies of nucleo proteins from one single virus. And that's how you know, where we, we get the detection started. PCR technology these days is a very well known. And it's a gold standard because a PCR technology can amplify the number of the RNA molecules. So from one to two, two to four, four to eight, until you are getting, you know, 30 to 40 cycles, you're getting, you know, these target molecules amplified significantly until you get, you know, a trillion of molecules, you can detect them in the lab. But the downside, although, you know, this is a very sensitive technology, the downside we all know this is very slow. You have to operate this in the pathology labs for a couple of hours until you've got the results, which typically require overnight, you know, one day to get the results. Ok, so that's explaining why, you know, PCR is so sensitive, but but that's that's also slow. There's another, you know, sort of a good news from Channel Seven and also the public domain. You can see I'm sharing this short clip with a clip from,
COVID test results in just 15 minutes. That's the promise, as new rapid testing kits rolled out across the state. But they're not without their downsides. It looks kind of like a pregnancy test, but this plastic stick is to be the bearer of some other good or bad news. It's very simple to use that the technology inside is quite sophisticated. So the tests can be run almost anywhere. You know that it's not just the only solution, but it's part of our solution in fighting Covid.
So, you know, this is some video from the news media. And also, I got this screenshot yesterday from the Sydney Morning Herald website. Australia has been fairly slow compared to other nations to implement the rapid antigen test. But it's all changing in the face of the Covid Delta variant. But there's a reason, you know why why we are being so slow. You know, not not because we don't know this technology, but we we're concerned, we have a concern around this technology. I, you know, get this message is a testimony from the teacher website. Adrian's daughter, unfortunately, got the COVID 19 virus recently, and he shared the experience by, you know, testing using this a home based test to monitor the positive and sensitivity of this commercial kit. And he found, you know, the rapid LFT antigen test was still negative and until four days into her symptoms. So that means, you know, in the first couple of days, the antigen tests are still not so accurate. We are getting some samples, commercial kit samples from the market and we test it in our lab. We're getting the known concentration of the protein antigen and we test, we check the sensitivity. And this slide shows you the principle, the animation shows you the principle how this technology works. So at the present of this virus, you can see a virus protein, the fluorescent molecule, like a fluorescent nanoparticle, can salvage the antigen in the middle at the test, the testing line area.
So if there are about, you know, 10 millions of the virus in the sample, the some, the testing might start to show a positive signal. So this is the current reality, reality about the antigen test using the European technology is quick, you know, only five minutes you can get results. But you need to have the high concentration of the virus in the sample until you can detect anything positive. So this is a somewhat limitation. Our government and the TGA approve the COVID 19 antigen test recently but has the emphasis saying, you know, they are less accurate, they can only be used for a symptomatic patient, and if you've gotten negative results, you still need a PCR as the confirmation test. So no matter whether you got positive or negative, you still need the PCR test. So you can see this, you know, the reality. So if we come back to this chart, you will understand why the antigen test, current antigen test are not ideal. So we've got this black window, but this is where the antigen test sits. So they are not sensitive enough. And that's why we couldn't apply them to screen the people in early stages. Ok. The scientific challenge, the scientific challenge for this technology is if you want to detect the proteins, the number of the protein cannot be amplified.
Ok, so at the beginning of the pandemic, the researchers and the scientists and also our team at UTS Institute for Biomedical Materials and Devices, we work together to consider, you know, translating our existing technology to a couple with, this very difficult situation from the science perspective. And we, our test is basically built on this, a new science of discovery we made for the last couple of years and is called nanoscopic upconversion nanocrystals. So this material is very fascinating because you could combine the multiple low energy longer with less emissions and convert them into the visible emissions. So you could put a few thousands of meters per small nanocrystals. So we're using in this case, about 40 nanometre crystals, you can put a few thousands in meters. So that means you could first detect the signal free of the background because you use the, neuro fract, excitation. Second, you can amplify optically amplify the signal by the number of meters per nanocrystals so that you can amplify the number of the target and the lights. Ok. So the journey is actually a long journey. But I, I cut this long story short. We made this fundamental discovery in science about eight years ago, and we published these results together with a professor, Tanya Monro, at the University of Adelaide. We demonstrate this a single crystal is sensitive enough to improve the limit of detection by three order of magnitude compared with the quantum dot technology.
We could detect a single crystal using a piece of fibre, and we further studied this technology under a microscope. We found, you know, each single crystal can emit a few thousands of photons per 100 milliseconds. So our naked eye can see the crystal, you know, under a microscope together with the cell. So you can see the transport, you know, moving in and out of a single crystal inside and outside of the single cell. So they are a single molecule probes. And in parallel, a couple of years ago, we worked with Minomic International in Sydney, a cancer biomarker company. So we translate this technology for very sensitive detection of the prostate cancer biomarkers in urine. So my student, Dr Ho, he did a Ph.D. with us a couple of years ago. He engineered this little box so we could patch this box into in front of the smartphone and we could use this new natural flow IC test to simultaneously detecting two proteins on one strip. And since that, the pandemic we retain the reagents and now we are targeting one spike protein, you know, by using one colour and targeting the nuclear protein, using the other colour of the probe. So we could simultaneously detect the presence of the virus protein at the same same test.
So this is our latest results. We've been collaborating with researchers at the Sydney Centenary Institute and also the clinical doctors at the Prince of Wales Hospital by testing our technology using the inactivated COVID virus. And we found our technology now is sensitive enough to detect the presence of about thousands to 10 thousands of viral particles from 100 microlitre sample. And this means that we already push, the limits of detection by at least another two order of magnitude. Soonce you push the limit detection by two order of magnitude and you can see from this chart, you can extend your detectable window, you know, goes into these dark, undetectable window period. So we can use this technology for detecting the asymptomatic patient. Ok, so this is of course, there's a quite a large scope for that, for us to further improve the technology and to add a single molecule level. Another good news is, you know, our industry collaborator Alcolizer, they been funded by some federal government funding and they re-tailor their fibre fabrication labs and establish the fabrication, you know, facility at Perth. And they can buy the UTS technology with Alcolizer's hardware technology. And we start to do this, you know, manufacturer and commercialisation process. So this is some good news.
The other possibility is really started by a problem, like the non-invasive testing potentials. So last weekend, I was approached by Martin. He said he wanted to have a test, but he couldn't use any existing test in the testing centre because they need a nasal swab and he got to some allergy issues. He couldn't use this, you know, swap based test. He was asking whether our technology can be used. My answer was, I think this was their response to a lot of questions during my lecture. So I provided the answer beforehand. Technology works in the lab. But in order to push this technology into the Australian market, I think there are some, there are still quite a few steps. You know, between the, you know, the lab based technology and the commercial product, because the procedure to get through this in through the clinical stages and department approvals are a lot more complicated and sophisticated than we initially thought. And if you know that when we're pushing further, pushing down, this limited detection by order of magnitude, we found our technology could provide a potential to do this, you know, detection from the saliva. But the big challenge from the saliva detection is you can see from this clinical data that there is a big variation between the number, the virus load means, you know, sometimes the patients who got infected can provide a very high amount of virus in their sample by, you know, 100 million. But sometimes, they can only provide about a few of thousands of the viral particles.
So that means we need to continuously push the limit detection from nanograms per mil, which is a current antigen test, can do down to picogram per mil, which is what our technology can do now and further down to tens of femtogram per mil until we could completely capture all the possibilities from the patient's sample. And of course, this is a moving target. You know, once you've started the research direction, you've found more you know, you get more solutions, you know, a lot of excitement, good solutions, but you'll find more problems. And it's a moving target because the virus, they become smarter each step they modify their protein on the surface a little bit. Then you have to, you know, capture the latest latest development of the antibody technology like a lock and a key relationship. So you have to adopt new reagents and make sure, you know, the technology can detect the new variant strains. And this is the chart to show you our current plan to push the technology from the lab based to clinical based and to the market and through the government approval. We already, you know, completed all the preclinical test and showing very positive results. And now we are requesting, you know, to develop more partnerships with clinical labs and doctors to access the real patients sample. First of all, we need maybe 20 confirmed patient sample to start to understand to the variation, you know, how much virus we could detect from confirmed cases.
Then we upscale into 200 confirmed patients in the mix of the healthy patients to check the sensitivity and specificity. Then we could use this technology to unknown cases, like a larger population of unknown cases. Once you complete all of these datasets, you can provide all the documents to the government and for the like a CFD and TGA approvals. Ok. Finally, I'd like to thank my colleagues and my postdocs and their students. They are extremely, you know, efficient. And they're hardworking members at IBMD, particularly during the pandemic, they are still active and productive in the lab. They sacrificed a lot, you know, these days and try to push this, accelerate the development of the technology in the lab. I sincerely appreciate their efforts. As I said, this is a joint effort between different groups and between, you know, UTS and also industry partners and external partners from hospital. And of course, without funding, we couldn't do this research. I would like to acknowledge Australian Research Council for continuously funding our research from the fundamental discovery level to engineering level now to the translation towards the industry usage. In particular, we would like to thank the Innovative Manufacturers Cooperative Research Centre for funding, directly funding this research towards the commercialisation and industry prototype development. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you very much Dayong. I really appreciate your your talk today and also for highlighting some of the issues that we face. In particular, we in New South Wales every day hear from the Premier, and we hear the numbers of people infectious in the community. And of course, you've now explained why that is the case, even with the very best of testing. And there's certainly hope for these quicker tests. As you've as you've identified, which will hopefully bring back that window to enable much quicker testing of people who are pre symptomatic or early symptomatic. So thank you very much for that. And I'm now going to introduce Anthony Friedli, Mr Anthony Friedli from Australian Clinical Labs. And before I do so, I suppose the main point that I'd like to make is that notwithstanding any of these quick tests, when they come through, when they are positive, of course, we still need to submit the patient testing for testing at PCR lab, such as what Anthony will describe shortly. Of course, this is really important for the contact tracing and for the strain detection. So it's only really in the labs under those with the PCR technology that Dayong referred to where we can achieve the type of tracing and strain detection. So let me introduce Anthony. Thank you very much, Anthony, for joining us today. Anthony Friedli is chief operating officer and Victoria CEO of Australian Clinical Labs. And his responsibilities include leading the business transformation on a national basis and managing in total the Victorian operation. Anthony also oversees human resources, quality and risk and business improvement functions right across Australian Clinical Labs. Prior to joining ACL, Anthony was managing director of Australia and New Zealand for Kepner Tregoe, a management consulting company specialising in business transformation. And Anthony has also held management roles within the telecommunications, banking and manufacturing industries. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us today. And I invite you to give us your presentation.
Many people start a career with a particular end game in mind. Some people keep to that path, while others go off on tangents and explore new frontiers. Many of you have heard of some of those success stories of careers that seem to evolve rather than follow a plan or a path that's well-trodden. I believe, your degree not only, it just it does not define you. It actually enables you to do amazing things. Today, I'm going to take you on a journey of how a UTS engineering graduate found himself managing at the frontline of this global pandemic. I will talk about the roller coaster ride, that is pathology, that is pathology is been for the past year, as well as the predictions of the future of what the cost will be and what issues and potential health risks are there within the community. So back in 1996, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, majoring in telecommunications. Throughout my time at UTS I had a cadetship with Westinghouse and worked my way through that organisation and eventually leaving and taking a role up in one of Australia's largest telecommunications companies, which was Optus. At this point you would suggest my logical career path have been achieved. What else would a telecommunications professional end up? And so then in 2015 my career was provided a tangent. And I found myself as the chief operating officer and Victoria CEO of Australian Clinical abs, a newly formed pathology company amalgamated Healthscope pathology and St John of God pathology and several other small players. An electrical engineer now running a pathology company, really? Pathology is a tough business. Only the top two private pathology companies actually make any money. All the rest, run at a loss. One payer, which is the government, 20 years of no fee increases on top of three major fee cuts means the industry is on its knees.
I was brought in to salvage a number of companies, and four years later, we managed to save these businesses from extinction and prevent the country from having another duopoly. The month was February 2020, my CEO calls me into her office and proclaims that when have successfully saved the organisation from closure and we will celebrate in March. We knew about coronavirus since November 2019, and then proactively worked up a test that would be able to be used if required. Little did we know, what was about to happen. I'd now like to take you on a journey of what Covid 19 looks like from the viewpoint of a pathology company. The way I'll portray this journey through the lens of work coming into our organisation. The axis on the left shows the percentage comparison of volume from previous years, the dark line across the graph is the zero percent line, which means that you're not making any money. Above the line, you're OK, below the line, you're losing. So what I have done is broken this story down into seven parts. February 2020 after four long years we have finally, the business was making a very meagre profit. It was enough to be invested back into the organisation and then organisation now could be sustained. 23rd of March 2020, disbelief. As our country was overcome by the fear of Covid and we plunged ourselves into lockdown, we watched as our organisation collapsed to give you relativity and use the boating analogy. Our business had minus 10 percent on this graph, starts to take on water, but at minus 40 percent, we've hit an iceberg. Work dries up coming into the lab. Patients abandon their doctors, private hospitals are ordered to close. Public hospitals are empty to make space for the anticipated patients that we saw in the US and UK. The world is confused that it stops, and so does our business. A quick calculation reveals that we have 45 days before we will like to close the doors. We will be out of business by mid-May. 30th April 2020, we are drowning. With work barely trickling in, and we have no way of paying our people. The government steps in and announces a jobkeeper for businesses that have slumped over 30 percent. We hurriedly apply and within two weeks, we have enough money to pay our people, not the full amount, but something. We decide not to lose any staff but reduce all pay. This lifeline does not save us, but it gives us another 20 days to survive. It's a deadline at the end of the tunnel, but it's a lot nonetheless. June 30, 2020, gasping for air. With pay rates, in some cases down 80 percent and staff down all over the country, Covid testing starts to rev up considerably. Then a new start, a new threat hits our organisation. One department is now functioning at levels, never seen, while the other nine scamper for work. As we retrain scientists we realise the biggest threat to our organisation and our existence, our supply chain.
Issues we now face. One: PPE to manage the collection of COVID is now in short supply and we are and we connected to a secret department in Canberra for supply. b. Reagent for our, for our equipment is now cannot be produced fast enough. And we're a small market in Australia so fair allotment is difficult. We strategically decide not the one supplier, but to deal with four. The variation is tough on our people, but keeping supplies is key. Qualified staff become tough in short supply with borders closed and it is tough to find personnel willing to work the gruelling 24/7 shifts that now keep up with demand. Swabs become impossible to find and all sorts of fly-by-night suppliers pop up trying to make a profit in these dire circumstances. Again, the federal government steps in and provides us with critical supply. Masks now become difficult to source, and therefore slow down our operation. Our lab staff are allocated masks, that if we miss one shipment, we will be, we will have to stop the testing and that will put pressure on turnaround times back to the public. So we are walking on a tightrope. The 9th of August 2020, resilience. As New South Wales, South Australia, WA and Queensland as shown in the green line, start operating in a kind of normal state, Victoria and the hotel quarantine bungle sends out business into a spiral.
Our organisation is heavily skewed to Victoria and healthcare again plummets in state, dangerously low levels with hospitals and doctors surgeries closed. We now have been here before and we've got good processes, good supply chains, and the testing we're completing keeps us afloat. So what will be the true effect of this second lockdown? 15th of October, 2020, Hope. Our organisation is almost back to pre COVID levels. We are expecting a surge of testing from the consults that never happened over the past few months but those never come. Our standard tests return and hospitals come back online, theatre lists fill up and elective surgery starts to come back. COVID testing is now constant and the experts believe that it's here to stay. Our profits return and we repay our jobkeeper payments. Our business has survived, but what is the toll that is taken on our people? December 10 2020, how do we manage this environment. Pathology's now in the limelight. We are weary that we've not only survived, but we've thrived. We now have technology that aids to speed up testing. We have processes and reporting that can navigate the toughest situations. We have formed relationships and bonds that will help us into the future. The threat of the next outbreak is never far, but we are ready. We are ready and capable. The story is continued throughout this year from Victoria, moving into its sixth lockdown to New South Wales now suffering through the longest lockdown ever. I hope that fine line this one has dispelled some of the myths of the affluence and good times it must have been feeling.
I can honestly say that these were the scariest times of my life. This story has much more to unfold. What does the future hold? How long will COVID 19 testing play be a thing? What does anti-body testing look like? Covid 19 passports, what are they and how do they work? Next winter, how long is the vaccine going to be effective for - new strains, severity, new challenges? Will we ever travel again, and how will it look? Pathology has been a driving force in the management of the pandemic but what have been the costs. Dr. David Deam and Dr Simon Nazaretian from Australian Clinical Labs have written a compelling paper titled The True Impact of Australia's COVID 19 Lockdowns on critical health diagnoses. In this paper they analysed the delays to medical appointments, cancer screenings and pathology tests of chronic health conditions over the past five years, and the results are truly frightening. To give you some frame on this, cancer diagnoses across the country and especially Victoria are down 18.9%. But what does that mean? One thousand Victorians were not diagnosed with melanoma in the last period. 650 breast cancers and 600 bowel and 620 prostate cancers go undiagnosed. 140 lung cancers are undiagnosed. These are absolutely staggering omissions. Looking at the graph on the right hand side, showing the critical difference between New South Wales and Victoria, 16% of diabetic patients have gone undiagnosed and untreated in the past 12 months.
To put that into perspective, one percent equates to 17000 tests, 17 percent downturned, and cholesterol testing and delays in treatment and or unmanaged conditions have occurred over this period. However, there were some interesting upsides to the pandemic that occured. Prenatal testing is up to 200 percent. We have, we will have quite a number of COVID 19 babies on the way. That testing is actually up 300 percent. The purchase of COVID 19 puppies have gone through the roof. And finally, Zoom is now a thing. Our pathologists now easily dial into multidisciplinary meetings and provide expert advice, remotely, adding to critical care and increasing their efficiency to talk about critical cases throughout the country. So I guess in summary, please never limit yourself to what you want to achieve in life. Never believe you must follow the obvious path of your career and life. Make sure, however, to be an expert in something in your career that is valuable. Be that go to person for something. For me, I learned how to transform the businesses that were struggling. I'm not a scientist, but I play to my strength and partner with those that could support me on that journey. Believe me, you have an exemplary career ahead of you. And don't be afraid to take the path less travelled. It might take you to places that you never thought possible. Thank you for joining me today.
Thank you so much, Anthony. I really appreciate your presentation today. And certainly it exemplifies the rollercoaster ride that you and your company had followed and certainly dispels many of the myths that I guess would have been circulating in, in our community. So just for our for our participants today, we have really already received a large number of of questions in the Q&A. But just reminding you where you can insert your questions. We have some minutes to respond to the questions, and I'll pose those to our panelists today. So I'm going to stop sharing now. And just for our for our panelists, then I'll start off by asking a question that came in pre, pre today's session, that came from one of the attendees. What are the challenges identifying the Covid virus and how do you differentiate between Covid and other types of viruses? Either one of you. I'm happy for either one of you to to respond.
Anthony, do you want to go ahead?
Honestly that might be one for you.
OK. So as I explained through the lecture, there are two possibilities, two strategies. One, you using the oligo test, you can detect in sequence, you know, you know, which which virus it is. Second, you can recognise the structure of the protein, because each variant, they when they are mutating, they will also change the protein structure. So you can and you can test the protein structure as well. And in terms of the rapid test, you know, we're developing that detection to targeting both nuclear protein and spike protein. Spike proteins are more specific to the Cov-SARS-2. Ok, the nuclear protein is specific, broadly cover all the coronavirus like, you know, the HIV and and other Coronavirus. So, you know, the spike proteins are difficult to detect. But this is a where the technology will go.
Thank you very much, Dayong. Yes, indeed. It's by testing the genetic material or the protein material at the at the surface, that's excellent. Thank you. And then maybe another question for you Dayong, and then I'll go to some of the questions that our participants have have lodged today. Will the test, such as yours be sufficiently affordable to be made available to the public through pharmacies, for example, for use at work and home?
We still don't recommend this test, it will be used at home because as long as, you know we haven't proved the saliva test, you know, the nasal swab, you know, it's not comfortable. I don't think everybody can use the stick properly in their nose. But the cost of the technology is getting lower. And so the cartridge on my hands is the ones produced by Alcolizer in Perth. So the cost of this cartridge only cost one dollar. The reagents on this cartridge, it only cost a few dollars. So the overall cost of could be, you know, between 10 to 20 dollars at the customer hand. So potentially this test can be, you know, a few dollar test. But depends, you know, how sophisticated the government approval and how much more, you know, data will be needed. And that all will build into the into the cost, you know, of the of the technology department.
Yeah, indeed. Indeed. And I know from our own association, Dayong, that you do try to make tests that are called point of care test. In other words, you make them really easy to use for for general public, but of course, within a limited parameter, a specified for their use. All right. So I'm now going to go to a question that came through the online chat. And again, for either of you, is the original or alpha strain of the Covid virus still prevalent or does each strain become superseded by the next one that comes in?
It's a good question. I would say when we're testing, there's definitely, they definitely look at the genetic material to see the thread. So in our lab, we would, the predominant what we would be looking for in the volumes that we're looking for would be the Delta strain. So the actual strain it is, is probably immaterial to the time getting back to getting a negative or a positive result. But it's definitely a high proportion of that genetic link.
Yeah, indeed. And I do recall from the previous sessions that we had on Covid, so just for our participants today, this is this is the second in the series. And I invite you to to visit the UTS science website for the first in the series where we had the member from New South Wales health pathology as one of our panelists. And they indicated that the predominant strain that is currently being detected is, in fact, the Delta strain. All right. So another question that has come through is effectively will we have to really learn to live with with the coronavirus into the future, or will it be suppressed?
I can, I can give you a pathologist view, so. I was sitting on a pathologist meeting today and they were walking, they were walking through and pathologists, are very balanced individuals, and they were saying that this will be, this will be here for quite some time. They they talked about in what forums. But their belief is that if you're thinking, if we are thinking running an organisation that we are looking for, that this will move on and that will be something in the past, they were saying that you need to bolster your organisation and bolster life that this will be part of life.
Indeed, I've heard other experts make make similar comments that we just we're going to have to learn to live with coronavirus for some time into the future. All right, so another question and Dayong, you touched on this to some extent in your presentation. How effective is hand sanitiser, such as the type that's used in hospitals in destroying the virus and maybe in comparison to hand washing.
It's a similar effects, to my understanding. I'm not an expert in this, you know, how to cure the virus. But recently, one of our post-op members put together a review article and seeing how to physically, you know, different variety of different ways to cure the virus. But hand sensitiser, because they have a high concentration of alcohol, they also, you know, departed the virus. But the solve isn't cheap and dirty and easy, you know, wash our hands.
Yes, indeed. And another one for you Dayong is when you when you were explaining the upconversion particles, you were explaining that they have the ability to absorb infrared light and to then emit a visible light. That's why we can see it. So we shine a dark light on it, and we then have visible light. It's a little bit of a technical question, but is there a specific wavelength or band of infrared that we that we use or prefer to use?
Yeah. So at the moment we prefer to use the bandwidth around 980 nanometre, around one micron. So one micron, your infrared and you can check the green in 550 and also the blue in 470. You can also generate that red colour around 660. So they're they're very colourful, you know, materials been discovered and demonstrated in the past couple of years. It's very interesting science, you know, science, scientific material. And that's actually, the whole team of my research group got addicted to this area for the last two years.
Yeah, I can see why that would be the case. Anthony, I don't know if you would be able to answer this one. I hope that you can. What exactly does it take to get a clinical test approved by the TGA or other branches of the government?
Yes, there is, there's a set of working up of the test. So you sort of got to get the technology within the lab right. And then a set of tests, you then grab, you then get what they call reference material from a governing body. That reference material will be a will be a positive so, so to speak. So the biggest issue at the start of the pandemic is that there was, you could not get positive material. So until remember, at the start of the pandemic, we had very few positives and it was very difficult. And we were, what we would like, we would that was basically synthesising and trying to make it. But we would have paid thousands just to get a positive so that we could actually so. So when you get those positives, you actually then have to work up the test and correlate that to the positive. And as soon as you're within a set of bands and you run a predominant sample size, there is a governing body called NARTA within this country that actually will then certify not only the equipment, but the testing process that you've got. And then that can then be brought into other types. And so every time you introduce the new equipment, a new piece of equipment, you need to go through that process that's very rigorous in this country.
Yeah, indeed. I certainly believe that that's true. And I understand that the issues would have been relatively difficult at the beginning, difficult to manage at the beginning, when indeed you had no access to, to particular specimens.
Material, that's right.
Yeah. So to our panelists today, thank you both so much for your presentations. I really value the insights that you've brought to us and also to our audience today. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope that you have enjoyed the presentations and thank you for staying with us today. Enjoy the rest of your day.
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Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to today's UTS Science in Focus, which is a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. I'm Professor Joanne Tipper, the head of School of Biomedical Engineering and also the acting Dean of the Graduate Research School. And I'll be comparing today's event, collating the questions and asking our speakers the questions at the end of the talk. Today's topic is important for understanding and developing new technologies to address health care problems in the ageing population. Before I introduce our speakers today, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation whose, upon whose ancestral lands our city campus at UTS now stands. I'd like to pay my respects to the elders, both past, present and also emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional owners, the custodians of knowledge for this land. Just a little bit of housekeeping before we begin today's session. It is an online only event, unfortunately. So do bear with us. If we have any technical issues, we'll work as quickly as we can to resolve them. And if you find you're not able to access the talk at any point, the easiest way to rectify that is to log out and then log back in again. That usually resolves these sorts of issues. We will be having a Q&A session at the end of the, the talks for about half an hour, if you would like to ask a question, then please type your question into the Q&A box on your Zoom control panel, and we'll do our best to answer all the questions at the end.
If you like somebody else's question, then you can upvote that question to make sure that it gets asked and you hear the answer. And you can do that by clicking on the little thumbs up symbol next to the question itself. And that will make that question rise up the the list. We will be recording the session today. However, we won't be recording any video or audio input from the audience. If you have any concerns about the recording of the event today, you can contact UTS at science.future@uts.edu.au. And the address is there on this line, so tell us any concerns that you have. So onto the interesting bit today, so our talk today is entitled Mending Broken Hearts with Cells and 3D Bioprinting Technology. Our speakers are Dr. Carmine Gentile from the School of Biomedical Engineering and then two artists who Carmine currently collaborates with, Paul Brown and Linda Dement. So I'm just going to give you a little bit of information about the speakers. So Carmine is actually a pharmacist and now a lecturer in the School of Biomedical Engineering at UTS. He leads the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group at UTS and also at the University of Sydney. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Pisa in Italy and then his Ph.D. from the Medical University of South Carolina in the US. Since 2013, Carmine has worked in Australia, first at the Heart Research Institute, then at the University of Sydney and now at UTS. He's been supported by numerous awards and grants, working with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, industry partners and clinicians to quickly translate his research findings from bench to bedside.
He's an internationally recognised researcher, expert in the field of 3D printing and stem cell technologies, and his more recent studies focus on novel, molecular and cellular approaches to treat cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and heart failure. These studies are based on the use of mini hearts, which he developed as bio-inks for human heart tissues. And that's the subject of today's presentation. Paul Brown is an Earth scientist, a creative artist and a producer. And for over 30 years, he's integrated arts practice, filmmaking and community engagement with university research and teaching. Paul's home base is Alphaville, a Sydney based arts company specialising in projects that link art, science and the environment. Linda Dement has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. She was originally a photographer and she deals with issues of disturbance, comingling the physical and the digital and electronic. With long standing interests in the body and technologies, she's worked with code and robotics and nonphysical code entities and now heart tissues. Paul and Linda have collaborated on a number of projects, including a previous collaboration with Carmine, to create hydrogel patches for life sized human, life sized human heart models. This was part of a display about extending life in an imagined future for the Museum of Futures. So this is where I'm going to pass over to Dr. Carmine Gentile to tell us about his exciting research. So over to you, Carmine.
Thank you so much, Joanne, and for the nice introduction and thanks to the organiser of this meeting today, and it is my great pleasure to share with you some of the latest advancements in this field, the research that we've been conducting in the past over 15 years. Again, I'd like to thank the Australian Museum for this great opportunity to talk to you guys about what we do. And together with the Royal Botanic Gardens, we were supposed to have this presentation directly from the museum. The museum allowed us to have this virtual background, virtually presented from the from the museum today. Now, let's start with the presentation and why we actually care about creating 3D bioprinting partitions. Now, we do know that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and by cardiovascular disease we include several conditions and in particular patients that suffer from a heart attack. They may develop what is called heart failure, which is an irreversible problem in the heart function that does not allow the heart to pump blood in our body anymore. It affects, on average, one person per hour. So you can imagine by the end of this talk, at least on average in Australia, is going to be somebody that is going to develop heart failure. Now, despite the fact that there is a lot of mismatch between organ donors and receivers, there's been a lot of focus on utilising different types of technologies, including stem cells, to create new ways to treat heart failure.
Now, let's talk a little bit more about what the real problem is about. Now, imagine the heart is composed of different building blocks, which are the cardiac cells, the muscle cells. Now following a heart attack, what happens is that multiple ones of these cells are not receiving oxygen and nutrients. Therefore, these cells are actually dying. Now, what we try to identify is a way to use stem cells that can be generated in different ways to basically create new cells that can replace, therefore, the missing building blocks in the muscle wall. Now, this has been the focus of several studies in the past years. Now there is the more we have done, the more we understood that there are so many challenges, so many difficulties. First of all, by injecting muscle cells into created from stem cells into the muscle of our patients. There is a problem of a potential arrhythmic effect. Therefore, the heart is pumping differently in different areas. There is also the problem of developing what is a type of cancer typical stem cells called teratoma. At the same time, if cells are transplanted from one donor to the other, there is the current need for immunosuppression, which is typical of any heart transplant. And most importantly, the majority of these cells actually die because the by simply, simply injecting them into the, into the patient, they're not able to survive the new environment. So what is the type of solution that we came up with? So first of all, we wanted to identify how to isolate cells from the same patient.
And we can do that in our lab by isolating the skin cells or blood cells from the patient. These are then utilised to create the stem cells, which are also called by either induced pluripotent stem cells. So once we are able to create these stem cells, they're therefore able to use blood, that became the first stem cells to make up all the cardiac cells that we need for our transplantation. But now we do know that transplanting them directly will lead to limited survival of the cells. Therefore, as bioengineers, we identify a way to create a friendlier environment. Therefore, creating a three-dimensional cardiac patch that can be helped, can help in this process, in generating a viable and functional tissue for the patient. Now as bioengineers, we need to talk about several aspects of this project and now in our lives specifically, we use 3D bioprinting technology as a tool that allows us to utilise the knowledge that we know about how the heart forms from the developmental point of view. We also use fancy tools from generated by bioengineers. At the same time, we need to make sure that cells that are utilized in the lab are compatible with the types of biomaterials that we use. Now we understand that the result, there is the need for a multidisciplinary team that is able to communicate with each other. We usually speak different languages from the central point of view. At the same time, what is really important is that we are able to transfer our knowledge in some bioprinted product that can be passed on to the ultimate player in our, in this platform, who is composed basically by the clinicians.
Therefore, we need to make sure that the type of research that we generate in our lab is able to translate from what our knowledge is to the patient via all these different steps. Now we also try to understand how to create the building blocks for this bioprint of heart tissues. Now, I usually refer to my students as in a way I try to promote, you need to become Masterchefs in science. Meaning you have the you need to require it, you're required to acquire all the possible knowledge or all the possible tools that are available out there and then utilising them in order for you to bioengineer heart tissue. Now, why MasterChefs? Isn't it the same for you guys when you're cooking, baking a cake or creating additions. So basically you're bringing together all the different ingredients. Now, in our case, our ingredients are found specifically in a laboratory and are used together with within our team to create the best tissue. Now, what are these components though? First of all, it's important that we are able to recreate the 3D biological ink that is also called bio-ink. This is a composite, this is composed by cells that we identified in in our laboratory that are basically 3D bioprinted, deposited layer by layer into a specific receiving bio-paper that in our case is composed by a gel, high in content of water and, which is therefore called hydrogel.
Now imagine mixing together cells with these gels, receiving the cells, and therefore the ultimate player in this, in this platform is basically the 3D bioprinter that allows the deposition to layer by layer by loading the bio-inks and the bio-paper into the nozzle of the 3D product that is basically regulated by the information that we pass on to the bioprinter. Now, the composition of the bio-inks and the bio-paper basically depends on the application of the type of tissue that we need to generate, but also whether we are using it for in vitro testing or transplantation and so on. Now, before we jump into the ultimate way to develop this, we have to understand what were the potential major challenges for us to transplant bioprinted patch. We identified the basically the patch that we had to generate had to, had to present, basically with the high component of blood vessels. Therefore, the vascularisation was one of the first major challenges in our in our routine, followed by also by the contractility activity. Remember that if the cells that once they've been transplanted are not able to construct and synchronously with the receiving heart, they're not able to communicate properly. And therefore there is the development of a medium.
Now, we actually try to understand from nature how to create a proper blood and blood vessel containing heart tissue. And in fact, we look at human heart biopsies that were stored here in Sydney and also when I went to Harvard in 2016 that were basically received and collected following the past several years where they were not able to be transplanted into, in location. There was no matching donor and receiver component. In this case, we were able to identify and to study how blood vessels are actually important in the development of the heart tissue. What you see on the right side is a 3D rendering analysis of a human heart tissue of a very young person, three weeks old human heart that was basically staying using different specific technique in our laboratory in order to highlight how the red blood vessels were present throughout the whole heart tissue. Now, we also understood that during embryonic development and what you see on the left side is microscopic images. The embryo presents what are called progenitor cells. These progenitor cells are making up different cell types in our body, blood vessels and also muscle cells in the heart. So what we identify is that for us to create enough building blocks, there is a natural process which is called cell proliferation, which is tightly regulated throughout the development of the embryo. Now this process is reiterated multiple times and allows the generation of the different areas that are found in the human embryo and later on in the in the heart, in an adult heart. Now, how do we go from learning what what nature uses to what we can bioengineer in our lab? Therefore, we start to think about how to create cardiac bionics and we start thinking, OK, what is what is the way we can, what which way we could develop in order to create miniature pieces of the heart that we could use as building blocks.
In our lab we we call this micro or mini hearts cardiac spheroid because their shape is a small sphere. Now, cardiac spheroids or mini hearts are basically the same different terminology for the same culture conditions, where we allow, that allowed us to in the past year to use four different applications that I'm going to talk about in this presentation today. Now, I would like to touch on the fact that basically during my early studies, when I was based in the United States, we were able to make sure that these mini mini components, mini micro tissues, were composed of different cell types. So what you see on the left side, on the top, you see basically a mini tissue, micro tissue that is composed of different mini blood vessels in green. Now, this mini blood vessel could be used to create bigger blood vessels, such as the micro tissue here shown on the bottom on the same image, that when we were actually using them in specific culture conditions in our, in our laboratory, we were able to use them as building blocks. And how they're basically allowing them to communicate with each other. You need to keep in mind that the cells that we use in in the lab, similarly to the cells in our body, are able to cross talk to communicate with each other.
So by basically putting together five different target spheroids, we are able to create a bigger spheroid structure by allowing them to interact, to fuse. So this process was also started in our lab on how two spheroids were able to fuse together over time. But ultimately, we wanted to understand also how to create not only bigger blocks, but also three-dimensional geometrical structures that we are able to control. For this, we were able to identify different ways to use different types of hydrogels, the same type of bio paper that I mentioned at the beginning that allowed the fusion of different cells within spheroids at the area of contact by allowing them also to maintain a certain either tubular or branch structure. So imagine this process reiterated multiple times. And there you go. You have finally your Legos, if you want, to build the different types of structures or tissues that you want to generate in our, in your blood. So specifically for the heart, we identify that there were three major cellular components that we require for our approach. First of all, by looking at the human heart biopsy, as I mentioned before, here in Australia and at Harvard, we identified there are three major cell types. First, we have the muscle cells, cardiac biocides. We have also the cells that make up the blood vessels, which are called endothelial cells in blue, whereas the cardiomyocytes is, cardiomyocytes are represented in red. And then also, we identify a third cell component. The green cells, if you want they are called cardiac fibroblasts. The cardiac fibroblasts are not part of integral part of the blood vessels, but they're actually able to release all the so-called extracellular matrix that allows blood vessels to be found and to communicate properly with the muscle cells.
Imagine this process happening in a testing testing tube. So what happens is that when we start with single cells, we're able to create spheroid mini heart. Now, how to make up the spheroid, cardiac spheroid from stem cells? We start with isolating cells from the human heart biopsies. Imagine these cells were frozen for many years. We identify a way to isolate them and to basically use them in our test tube. Now, as a comparison, we start creating spheroids from stem cells that were identified in our laboratory to recreate to generate the muscle cells. Now, from the comparison of these two types of cell sources. We were able to generate a miniature blood vessel formation. So these images on the left side, you can appreciate microscopic images where we have different cell types together. Again, the muscle cells in red, the green cells are basically making up the extracellular matrix and the blood vessels are in blue. When we use a specific technique to create a three-dimensional analysis of this microscopy image, we identify that all the mini blood vessels that we recreated in our lab were basically present throughout the whole tissue.
And this is really, really important because, any tissue that is thicker than one fifth of a millimetre will develop the cell death in the centre. By recreating these blood vessels, we were able to prevent cell death in the centre and therefore allowing cells in this way to be used as building blocks and create viable, functional bigger structure. Now, we also identify the blood vessels were formed by the crosstalk between the the green cells that were releasing the extracellular matrix and the forming blood cells that were creating the new blood vessels. Therefore, we were able to achieve new blood, new blood vessel formation, by basically allowing these cell types to communicate properly in our lab. Now, there you go. We have this bio-ink information, therefore we try to identify what were the different applications. One includes the patient specific drug testing. Another one includes the development of personalised kind of toxicity testing. At the same time, we wanted to use them for organ printing and promote cardiac regeneration in patients. Now, let's talk briefly about drug testing. So in our lab, by using in context clues, we were able to identify how and to test how toxic drugs such as doxorubicin, which is a well known cancer therapy used for leukaemia, lymphoma patients and breast cancer patients. This specific drug is very effective at killing the cancer. At the same time, it is widely known for promoting toxic effect on the heart of these patients, even several, several years following the treatment. Specifically in kids that suffer from leukaemia and lymphoma that received this drug.
The patients may die up to 17 years following the treatment of doxorubicin because the drug is killing muscle cells, cardiac muscle cells. Now in our laboratory, we were able to identify, first of all, the toxic effect of doxorubicin within one day using our cardiac experience. At the same time, using a chemical and genetic approaches, we were able to identify what were the effects of doxorubicin on the different cell types, muscle cells, endothelial cells and fibroblasts. These allowed us to to basically create potential new therapies that may prevent specific toxic effects of doxorubicin by leaving the opportunity to kill the cancer at the same time. We also used spheroid cultures to mimic, to model what is called cardiac fibrosis, which is typical of, this is the typical stiffening of the heart following a heart attack. This is really important because in some way, cardiac fibrosis is typical or in heart failure patients and is responsible for the development of such a condition that prevents the heart from pumping properly.
Now, let's focus more on 3D bioprinting after all this, short introduction. And basically before we are able to bioprint, should we have to identify what was the optimal composition of the heart in a way that we were able to use polymers and cells in the best way? Now we identify all the cellular components, as far as I mentioned to you guys.
So the next step for us was to identify which type of 3D bioprinter to use. And we have tested several ones in our laboratory. As you can see the nozzle, it was printing in specific containers. Now, what we were depositing to start with were different types of hydrogels. In order to make sure that even after bioprinting, there was the opportunity to maintain these cells in specific locations for a long time. We also identified under the microscope how these types of hydrogels were looking over time and how they were modified. Also, the properties typical of the cardiac cells. We also tried to identify whether this, our cardiac spheroids after the bioprinting process were viable over time, so we tested at least for 28 days following the bioprinting, we were able to maintain them viable without any toxic effects. At the same time, we try to identify whether we were able to promote a new blood vessel formation within the bioprinting construct. We we actually learned again from nature for this process and specifically, the specific, we have used growth factor, a molecule that is utilised in the, in the embryo to promote new blood vessel formation. Now, we used, first of all, we identified using microscopes to how well we were able to promote new blood vessels which are identified in red in the figures on the right side. Now you can see how the arrowheads are pointing out how the the growth factor was able to promote new blood vessels into the bioprinting tissue.
And by using a similar approach to what we showed you before, we are able to recreate a very delicate, delicate and elegant 3D rendering analysis of the whole culture. So what you see here in blue are basically the nuclei of the different cells composed in the bioprinted cardiac spheroids. Together with the, all these brand new blood vessels, they are spanning from the mini hearts that we bioprinted into the surrounding tissue. Now, we also evaluated how to use different spheroids together after the bioprinting. So you can see from on the left side how three spheroids were coming together on the first day after one hour, and then over time, within three days, they were able to fuse together. We use also computational modelling and other approaches to model how well this is happening in our, in 3D. And by again, by looking under the microscope, we identify how beautifully the new blood vessel formation was happening, not only at the level of one single bioprinted spheroid, but also it was passed on from one spheroid to the other one following the fusion in our construct. And I can tell you guys, these type of images took us a lot of time and lot of effort from different team members in our, in our group. Now, we may end up a beautiful bioprinted construct, but how do we actually test whether they are functional or not?
And when we started this project, we were very limited in how to test the contractile function, right, of this three dimensional concept. So basically, we identify different ways to create an ECG like readout to measure how well this bioprinted spheroid would react to different stimulation. Could be chemical, it could be electrical in our heart and so on. So this was a multidisciplinary effort that brought together experts from here and others in the United States and also in Europe. Now, I would like to touch on also on how to improve the bioprinting progress by creating specialised bioprinted patches. Now, this is the focus on one of my students, Chris, that and he's a cardiac surgeon trainee himself. And he's been taking some time off from his surgical training to spend some time in our lab and decide to focus on a full PhD project that tests and evaluates how about 3D bioprinting patches could be a potential solution for heart failure patients. Chris, learned how to basically generate these bio-inks that were basically the first step in our lab. At the same time, these cells have been mixed together within the hydrogel that we have identified in our life and basically three-dimensionally printed using the bioprinter that we have available in our lab. I'd like to highlight the fact that we are very lucky with the support of UTS creating a smaller 3D bioprinting hub here in Australia. Now, the beauty of our studies, especially specifically from increases recent publication, we were able to identify not only that our hydrogel and cell composition allowed us to create a viable and functional tissue, but we are able to, we were also able to create new blood vessels like the one that is shown on the 3D rendering analysis on the left side.
You can see how we can actually navigate inside the new blood vessels that are represented in green by these images and how well, potentially this could be transplanted into the patient. Now, the strategy for all of this is that basically we want to identify the best way to use the scans that are from the clinic. And for this, we're working with clinicians that allowed us to use both MRI and CT scans that allow us to, allow us to create a three dimensional model of the, of the heart of the patient, identify the area that has been impacted and therefore is not functional anymore, and use this information to create the patch that we will be in 3D bioprinted in our lab. Now, all of this information is utilised in the lab. As information that is transferred into the computer that controls the bio printer and therefore the layer by layer, the position of mini hearts within bioprinted hydrogel, is that basically the approach that we're using in our lab nowadays.
So just to give you a short summary of the different advantages from our approach, first of all, we want to learn from nature on how to create, how to promote regeneration. We also want to highlight the fact that there is the opportunity to create a personalised therapy based on the fact that we are using cells from the same patient. Therefore, there is also the opportunity to improve the quality of life, not only for the patient, but also for the family, and we do know that given the lack of, the heart for transplantation in Australia and from memory in around 100 transplantations, around 100 hearts are transplanted in Australia per year. And if you do your calculation, you may come up with basically around ten thousand heart failure patients so that you can you can understand how big the gap is between how they can be transplanted and the risk the patient actually requiring a new heart for transplantation. Now at the same time, I would like to highlight the fact that using cells from the same patient will not lead to any rejection. At the same time, we're using an approach that does not use any other method that is known to be become safer for the patient as well in the long run.
Now, given the fact that there is a lot of emphasis on recreating petris and creating petris for transplantation, I would also like to highlight the fact that nowadays we are using these mini hearts to to mimic complex diseases such as heart attack. Now, recently, we have published a study where we identify what are the different challenges in recapitulating a heart attack in a petri dish and why you may think this is really important. If you think about different conditions besides following the establishment of a heart attack, but also, for instance, nowadays, we do know that COVID, for instance, is affecting more severely cardiovascular disease patients.
This would allow us to create a model tool to basically evaluate what are the effects of COVID on damaged hearts in a test tube before having to wait for the effects of such, such a disease in a patient. And this is actually the focus of several students in our laboratory. And with this, I would like to conclude the presentation by highlighting the fact that I had the recent opportunity to work together with Paul and Linda that will talk after me, on how to basically better communicate the science that we do in our lab. Now, I am, I am aware that some of the terminology that I have used today may not be familiar to many, many or many persons in the audience because of the lack of laymen terms. And that was a great opportunity for me to engage with Paul and Linda. In the same time, I would like to highlight the fact that by working together on a project last year, we were able to create a real size 3D bioprinting patch using the hydrogel that have detailed before and then stitch it onto a 3D printed heart, a real size. From this experience, we actually learn a lot and we understood that there is more research and into what is going to be become essential for, first of all, the personalisation of the page, but also for the delivery of the bioprinter tissue.
Now, there has been a lot of media attention and in the past years, obviously, because of there is a lot of emphasis and there is a need for this bioprinted tissues from both the patients and the family. And there was also a funny story about one of the newspapers that identified put together the news about a fugitive. And that is not actually me, that there was somebody that will give you two hundred thousand dollars potentially to find this person. And I can assure you guys, nobody is giving you any money to catch me, even in this current pandemic conditions. Now, with this, I would like to highlight especially the fact that there has been a very important support by colleagues, students here in Australia and overseas. And we managed to to support ourselves by thanks to the support of different funding bodies, especially from donors that also were affected potentially from cardiovascular disease. And finally, I would like to conclude my talk by thanking the protagonist of all of this story. So today it's been me presenting, but I would like to highlight the fact that all the students in our lab have been spending hours, days, years in the making what we've been able to share with you guys in the last half an hour. And it is now my great pleasure to pass the presentation on to Paul and Linda. And now it'd all you, Paul.
Well, thank you Carmine and welcome, everyone, we're Paul Brown and Linda Dement the artists who are currently in residence with the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group. And together we have a background in creative arts and science and. And last year, we approached Carmine and we found his work to be groundbreaking and visionary and the concept of 3D printing, of living, beating heart tissue is such a rich ground creatively, philosophically and scientifically. We collaborated with Carmine and his team to produce a bioprinted hydrogel patch for a life size model of a human heart. This slide shows the artwork, the heart with the pink coloured patch placed where heart attack damage commonly occurs, and this was exhibited for the museum that features Pandemic Pivot project. And our work was about future possibilities surrounding issues death, dying and the extension of life. It presented a futuristic, though perhaps not that far off scenario of patches being used routinely to repair damaged hearts and extend life. This led us to our current project in residence with a cardio vascular regeneration group for six months to develop our art science interdisciplinary collaboration much further. So far, we've been becoming familiar with the lab and the research as much as is possible during lockdown. And we are fortunate enough to have a lab visit just before lockdown for an introduction to the technology and processes involved. Since then, we've been having interviews with team members online to find out more about particular aspects and details of the research, such as surgical issues, the ways that hearts form and develop in the embryo, experiments on 3D printing structures for cells to grow in, and the transformation of medical scan data into 3D models. All these experiments on 3D printing structures, materials and shapes and the transformation of medical scan data into 3D models, all of these that are of interest to us, as is the functioning of the laboratory itself with its equipment and the techniques of bioprinting and microscopy. And we can think of this as laboratory theatre and find ways to celebrate that. I'm going to pass on to Linda now.
We've also been looking at works by other artists who deal with scientific or medical processes, as well as looking at historical anatomical imagery, we've drawn pictures of cardiac steroids under the microscope. And overall, we've generated far too many ideas. It's early stages for our project at the moment, but we're now heading along two main trajectories, one being the transformation of data into three dimensions for bioprinting and cell cultivation such as converting audio to 3D form. We're interested in formulating 3D shapes that can be used as structures on which to grow heart tissue, to create kind of tiny living sculptures. So, for example, the volume, highs and lows of a heartbeat sound could be used to create the hills and valleys of the three dimensional form that then could be bioprinted to cultivate tissue. For the audio, we're trying out sounds directly related to the human experience of heart trouble, breath, heartbeat, the noises of scanning devices, the sounds patients might make or hear in hospitals. Secondly, we're looking into the process of forming 3D shapes from 2D surfaces, including pattern making techniques such as have been used for years in dressmaking or upholstery. Also, other artists have made paper falling out, some of which has been used to create sculptures of human organs, including the heart. We're asking here, how can 2D surfaces be formed into patches with an accurate fit on individual heart topographies? The unique details of each person's heart and the mobile contracting and expanding volatility of real hearts makes this very interesting and challenging. We're maintaining a blog throughout this project, and we'll make this link available if you want to check in on our progress. The creative arts offers an interdisciplinary and hybrid approach to research. We hope our project will develop alongside the scientific research of the lab in a way that assists communication of scientific findings, that brings new perspectives to the research and perhaps ventures into unexpected territories. We're funded by the Australia Network for Arts and Technology through their Synapse program and also by Create New South Wales. Thank you.
So I'd just like to thank today's, all of today's speakers for some very interesting presentations. We had quite a lot of questions come in through the Q&A and I see the audience has been busy upvoting some questions so we can start with those questions. And we've got roughly about 10, 15 minutes for questions. So we will start with the most popular question, is what is actually in the bioprinted patches and how is heart tissue actually created through bioprinting? So, Carmine, maybe you can start with that one.
Thank you, Joanne. And thank you again to you guys for this opportunity. And thank you guys for listening during your lunch break, I assume, to my presentation today. So I know it's a long story, what I try to share with you guys today, that brings together 15 years right in the making. But essentially what we put in our, in our bioprinter, we try to put together cells that are isolated from the patient. And therefore, nowadays we are focusing more on taking blood from the patient and from this blood make up the stem cells. The stem cells are utilised to make up the heart cells. And then these heart cells are mixed together in our laboratory with a technique that we have developed in the past year to make the mini hearts. Now the mini hearts by themselves, they need to be embedded, mixed with a specific type of hydrogel that we have identified with our studies in the past year as well. And therefore, the mixing of the mini hearts or cardiac spheroids within the hydrogel that we generated in our lab is loaded into the nozzle of the bioprinter. Now, how we create this three-dimensional object is basically some information that we control through a computer. Therefore there is this, there is a computer that dictates in which position on the X, Y and Z axis, we deposit this the bio inks that we create from patients' specific cells. I think the that is the question. Is that correct?
Yeah, that's that's good. And the questions are all moving around now because people are clicking on them. But that's good. And there's a couple of kind of related questions about what other things could the bioprinting be used for in the future and is the technology transferable to other tissues? Say lung tissues.
Thank you again for the question. Now, during my early studies in the United States, I was actually focusing on a more general approach. And basically by identifying as this type of question is actually highlighting, is there a way to create any type of tissues that we require for our body? So during my early studies we identified, the very first component during the body development are basically blood vessels. So in order, in a way to to establish a platform to create any type of cells of tissues for our body, we rectify that by being able to create blood vessels in a test tube as part of the bio-ink, we were able to identify a potential approach that can be shared with other applications. For instance, in our way, in our approach for this specific presentation today, I showed you how to put together blood vessel cells with heart cells, right? And that how we created the bio-ink for the bioprinting of Parkinson's. Others may use different cell types, liver cells, together with blood vessel cells and recreate a 3D bioprint of liver tissues, kidney, brain. And why is that possible? Is based on the fact that all of these different types of organs in our body are actually going through the first initial step of the recapitulation of the blood vessel network. And why is this really, really important? Because any cell type in our body requires some supply of nutrients and oxygen. And that's where blood vessel comes in. And that's why the vascularisation, the generation of new blood vessels has been one of the major challenges for 3D bioprinting in many, many for many, many years. In the past.
Ok, so there's another question, Carmine about how long does it take to make a bioprinted heart?
Ok, thanks again. So it really depends on which side, which step of the research are we talking about? Remember that there is the different steps involved. There are there is the isolation of cells from the patient. There is the generation of the stem cells. There is also the step where we need to create heart cells from the from the stem cells. And then there is the making of the bio-ink and the actual bioprinting process. Now, the bioprinting actually is the simplest, if you want, nowadays, given the fact that the technology has advanced so much in the past years. When I start working on 3D bioprinting technology in 2006, I can tell you that the actual bioprinter was taking almost a full room and it was costing over a million US dollars. Nowadays, you can find a way to create your own 3D bio printer by just looking on YouTube, whatever you want, and you can create your own cheap version of the 3D bioprinting. Similarly, technology has been advanced a lot and the commercially available bio printers that are available nowadays allow us to create a bioprinted patch within minutes. Now, as I just pointed out, the bioprinter requires that you have access to the cells that you want to use for your personalised approach. Now, there is also, there is a lot of requirement that we identified more recently in how to better create these 3D bioprinter patch specifically to cover the area that is being affected following a heart attack. Now, this actually varies a lot now, depending on the type of disease, the type of the damage that the heart is developed. Imagine that depending on where the heart attack takes place, you may have a heart attack area this size, bigger size and so on.
It varies from person to person. You may still require a few weeks in the making or in the making of the stem cells. On average, we identify between four weeks and eight weeks for the making of the stem cells. Once these cells have been isolated from the blood of the patient, followed by the differentiation, the promotion of muscle cells from these cells, which takes usually around one month. Following these steps, you need to make up enough building blocks, as I mentioned during my talk today, depending on the area that you want to call it. And that varies from from patient to patient. So we we expect that once this is fully established for the clinic, we might be able to provide a bioprinted patch within three months from the isolation of the cells. Now are talking about something that what is the state of the art nowadays? But we don't know whether in a few years time all of these processes might be advanced so much that allow us to to create a human heart cabin where the patient would walk in and the technology might be so advanced that the that the cabin is allowing the bioprinting of the patch within the same within an hour. We don't know that. So our hope is that the technology and the research that is available nowadays can further improve how we we actually develop the tissues and the bio-inks in the future to to speed up the whole process in the making as well.
Ok, thank you. Now, one for Paul and Linda. And so there's a couple of questions about where they can find the artistic pieces and also a question about how you how did you design your 3D printed art using sound that seems to be an area of interest.
Linda can start on the sound question.
We haven't finished the sound at work yet, but so far we've been working on using quite simple programming techniques to take levels from frequency and volume, because you can imagine those are just numbers, bigger numbers, louder sound sort of thing, and translating those into shapes which then go over time and then taking all of that time as the third axis to make three dimensions. That's not completed. So that's underway. Paul.
And if you're looking to follow this project, best to go on to the Australian Network for Arts and Technology and that website where you can find our blog and going back through the slides, I won't put it up now, but is the address for that blog. And we're working on this project across the next six months or so. And we expect in October, November, there'll be a lot more production of artworks, which you'll probably be interested to see.
Ok, well, we are really running out of time and there are rather a lot of questions in the chat, 48 questions still to answer. So what I will say is that Carmine and Paul and Linda have agreed to answer the questions offline and we'll be posting those answers on a web link that you'll receive by email from the organisers of the webinar today. So there's really lots of questions about how close is this to patients? How how will patients be assessed for the for the treatment? How will it help somebody in this particular scenario? So there's lots and lots of questions, really important questions that remain to be answered. But unfortunately, we don't we don't have the time now to answer them. But as I said, we will, we will post those answers so that everybody gets their questions answered. There's also quite a few questions from students, saying, you know, what advice have you got and how did you get into bioprinting Carmine. Because it's such an interesting area of and novel area of science as well. So hopefully you'll be able to answer those questions as well.
But it just remains for me to thank the panel for, you know, a really interesting presentation, really lively answers to the questions and also to thank you the audience, for attending today. And us, as Carmine said, you know, giving up what potentially is your your lunch break today to listen to the science. Thank you very much for joining us today. And we look forward to seeing you next time.
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EVENT VIDEO
COVID in the Lab - Staying ahead of the curve
UTS and NSW Pathology experts discuss the virus and how we are responding to it.
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Forensics -
Mathematics
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Environment -
Medical and Biomedical Sciences
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Physics
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