Vito Butardo
Swinburne University of Technology Lecturer
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Dr Vito Butardo Jr obtained his PhD degree in Agricultural Sciences at The University of Queensland in 2011 where he majored in plant molecular biology, biochemistry and biotechnology. He was then awarded postdoctoral research fellowships at the CSIRO Plant Industry (Canberra, Australia), International Rice Research Institute (Los Baños, Philippines) and Charles Sturt University (Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia). He holds a bachelor\\'s degree in Biology Major in Microbiology from the University of the Philippines (UP) Los Baños (Honours). He then worked and studied at the UP Diliman, where his major research focus is on marine microbiology. For his doctoral and postdoctoral research, he screened for low digestibility rice grain phenotypes from diverse wild, cultivated and mutant rice varieties. He then developed low digestibility rice grains by genetic engineering to alter the storage starch biosynthetic pathways in rice endosperm. This was accomplished by endosperm-specific RNA silencing of major starch branching enzymes and starch synthases in rice. He demonstrated that shifting the synthesis of starch to elevate the proportion not just of amylose but also of long chain amylopectin results in reduced starch hydrolysis and lowered glycemic impact. More recently, he employed nutritional biochemistry, grain quality genomics and systems genetics approaches to understand grain quality phenotypes using diverse collections of world rice accessions. He joined Swinburne University of Technology in September 2017, where his major research initiatives will focus on microbial and agricultural biotechnology. His major research goal is mitigating the impact of malnutrition by enhancing food security and nutritional value of cereal grains. He is also interested in understanding the impact of climate change on grain quality, yield and nutritional properties of cereals and in utilising agricultural wastes for industrial purposes.
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