Dr Steve Jobling

Steve gained his PhD in plant virology at the University of Birmingham UK and then did postdoctoral studies at Harvard/MIT in the area of regulation of gene expression in plants which culminated in a paper in Nature. He then did a second postdoc with Steve Rogers at Monsanto Co (St Louis, USA) before spending over ten years at Unilever’s main food research centre Colworth House in the UK concentrating on the creation of novel starches and functional foods. This work was published in several papers in Nature Biotechnology including high amylose potato and freeze-thaw stable starches and the first demonstration of the use of llama antibodies (now called nanobodies) to alter plant metabolism.
He joined CSIRO in Matthew Morell's group in 2005 to produce new varieties of cereal crops with improved nutritional and product quality attributes by manipulation of plant carbohydrate metabolism (starch and non starch polysaccharides). He contributed to the research and led the teams that commercialised two novel grains; BARLEYmax and HealthSense high amylose wheat. When Matthew Morell moved to IRRI, he took over as program leader for a while before concentrating once again on the major focus of his research - the control of betaglucan biosynthesis in cereal grains. Part of this included setting up a six year multi million dollar FFF high fibre grains collaboration cluster with U.Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane as well as a substantial research program on high fibre cereals with a multinational company. A major achievement was the generation of high solubility betaglucan wheat by overexpression of the oatCslF6 gene and plants are currently at the field trial stage and nutritional substantiation. He has become one of the world leaders in this field with recent breakthrough discoveries understanding how the CslF6 protein controls betaglucan structure. His current area of focus is exploiting the use of gene editing to create even healthier cereal grains.