So the aim of CropPAL is to really bring together data sets from around the world. There's people all over the place making this information. If we can aggregate that and put it in one place, it helps in a variety of ways. Now we thought maybe we need to find out by doing experiments, but in fact we found that there's an awful lot of data already out there. It's already available.

It just had never been put together. So what CropPAL was about was saying how do we get that information about proteins in crops, pull it all together from around the world to be, in some sense, a pal, a help to people who are wanting to know where things are in cells. One of the things that we found already is that the proportion of proteins which are

in particular kinds of roles varies between these crops. So the proportion of effort that they put into protein synthesis or the proportion they might put into defence or photosynthesis varies. So this is important in understanding why we have these major crops, why they're grown

in different locations and what the economic opportunities are for different plants as the climate changes to actually cope with the future world requirements we have to feed the planet. There is a benefit to the scientists, but there's also a benefit to the industry because the way we look at breeding is slowly changing, so we need to have a more

predictable way of breeding plants. So we don't just try a lot of different things. We want to have a targeted approach to say we have more success if we know what to target in our breeding. So by using this data, we will be able to unlock more knowledge about the functions

and the proteins in the plant and to develop more competitive crop plans. So I think one of the things it will do is actually show the holes. It's not always what you want data to do, you want data to actually achieve things as well, but it will do both. It will actually show ways that countries and research communities can be working together internationally, but it will also show areas of investment that are required.

So a lot of different kinds of people will benefit. Individual researchers will benefit because they can ask the question about one protein and where it is, if they're very interested in working on it. Biotechnology companies can actually go and gain access to the information because it's all public. We see that with the work that we've been doing on salinity and temperature responses

in wheat, that the capability and information that we have actually enables us to work with farmers and people who are actually doing field trials and trying to understand what's more temperature-sensitive or temperature-tolerant in wheat, and what's more salinity-tolerant in wheat, and working out what the proteins are that are responsible for that.

Growing up in Western Australia, it's very difficult to escape the fact that salinity is a major problem for wheat farmers in the wheat belt. Certainly when I was a kid, we went on a primary school expedition to go and see saline soils and crops which were affected by salinity, and I suppose that affected me. It made me see that landowners and farmers are suffering and that with biochemistry and

new techniques that we have here, we can really bring solutions to them to help Australia succeed and help our farmers succeed.