Singapore lab 'photocopies' forest

'Mother' plants used to clone trees for wood products, to avoid land clearing
Grace Chua Straits Times 14 Aug 10;

AT THE BioForest plantation on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi stand half a million trees, uniformly straight and tall.

The white teak, sengon and acacia trees, whose wood is used for furniture, plywood and paper pulp, were not grown in a nursery. Instead, they were cloned from fast-growing 'mother' plants in a Singapore laboratory nearly 2,000km away.

Because they mature one to two years faster than ordinary plantation stock, these high-yield trees offer an alternative to clearing land for plantations, say BioForest researchers.

Such deforestation involves cutting down trees that are an important sink for the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and could hasten climate change.

And land for plantations may well become scarce as Indonesia this year announced a two-year moratorium, starting next January, on issuing new forest concessions. The moratorium is part of a US$1 billion (S$1.36 billion) deal with Norway, in which the Nordic state will pay Indonesia to cut carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

The BioForest start-up began in 2006 as a joint venture between Temasek Life Sciences Ventures - the commercialisation arm of Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) - and Singapore-based wood-products maker Kim Hong Seng Regional.

The lab's researchers hit upon the idea of propagating these tree species because of their commercial value, and selected the Sulawesi plantation site for its soil quality and location, said TLL chief operating officer Peter Chia.

In a process that is kept a trade secret, trees whose strong suit is growing fast - or being drought- or disease-resistant - are genetically analysed to suss out their strengths, and then cloned in a tissue culture lab.

'It's like a photocopying machine,' Mr Chia said.

In conventional cloning, a cutting is taken from a tree branch or stem at a particular stage of maturity.

But no cuttings are needed in this tree factory. It can use a fragment as small as a twig or a leaf, and clone the clone, so that theoretically, a million plants can be derived from a single twig in a year in this exponential process.

BioForest also ensures genetic diversity by picking different individual trees as the original mother plant every few months.

'Starter' batches of young plants are produced in Singapore, and further 'photocopies' are made and cultivated in a lab and nursery at the Sulawesi site. Conditions are controlled so that the plants are protected from pests and harsh weather.

And by 2012, BioForest's first batch of 10,000 white teak trees will be delivered to an Indonesian plywood mill.

Now that the 500ha plantation is filled, newer seedlings are sold to other plantation companies. They fetch a premium as they take just five to six years to grow to commercial size, compared with seven to eight years for normal trees.

Mr Chia said: 'Because the trees grow faster, you can get the same yield from a smaller piece of land. If you have less need for land, there's less pressure to clear new land.'

Commenting on the BioForest start-up, Dr Koh Lian Pin, an ecology research fellow at Switzerland's ETH Zurich, said it could alleviate pressures to clear tropical rainforests for timber in South-east Asia.

But he was worried that the same technology could cut costs of seedling material and expand profit margins for timber producers, thus inadvertently encouraging the industry to expand even faster.

'Technology is always a double-edged sword. The responsible stewardship of tropical rainforests requires not just better technology for timber production, but also a careful assessment and management of priorities among different segments of civil society, which would necessarily include economic development, environmental protection and the sustenance of people's livelihoods,' Dr Koh said.

Around the world, other tree species are also cloned for other purposes, such as pine and eucalyptus for timber in the United States, and poplar for reforestation in China, but BioForest is believed to be the only group doing it in Singapore.

Locally, TLL has been working with the National Parks Board (NParks) since June 2008 to grow 'rare and horticulturally interesting tree species' using the tree-cloning technique, said Dr Tan Puay Yok, head of research at NParks' Centre for Urban Greenery and Ecology.

Six species are currently being tested, including the Maniltoa lenticellata (Pink cascading bean tree), which is difficult to propagate using traditional methods.