Australia is a unique place. We have so many endemic species, which means we have species which we can only find in Australia, or maybe even only in certain region in Australia. 

We really need to protect this, because we rely on living together with nature.

Plants when you look at them through a garden they might be covered in various spots and dots, but is that actually a spot and dot of concern? 

In the case of Myrtle rust it's quite a devastating pathogen. Myrtle rust is a very devastating fungus because it infects over 300 of our native species. Ones we really love such as eucalypts. Our native species don't have resistance genes against myrtle rust. And this has led to five of our native species becoming critically endangered because of myrtle rust. 

We have so many native species that are on the brink of extinction from myrtle rust like this Melaleuca, and it's really important to understand the disease better to protect our natives. 

We're going to have a very unique network of samplers all the way around Australia's coastline in Australia's major botanic gardens undertaking the same sampling strategy and the same approach of trying to understand what's going on with Myrtle rust. 

We're able to find where we have got these fungi, where are they prevalent and how much. And part of our work is to understand how we can breed resistant plants to Myrtle rust. It's definitely a driving motivator to contribute to caring for country so we can pass it on to future generations, to our own kids, and grandkids. 

Spores are all around us. Fungi are all around us. Air we breathe is full of particles. It might be pollen, often it's also fungal spores. Fungi release these really tiny particles which you can only see with the microscope. 

The spores are the way that fungi try to reproduce and so they put them out into the air hoping that it will land on other fungi and then also of course they can land on a new leaf and when they land on a new leaf from another plant then they can infect this new plant. 

Here we're looking at a heavily infected leaf of a Macey plant and you can see the very characteristic yellow spores of Myrtle rust. Plant pathogens are designed to move their airborne spores through the air, sometimes short distances, but sometimes great distances as well. 

So, we've put in an air sampling device here at the Botanic Gardens that is able to trap fungal spores from the air. It's like a big Hoover where you collect the spores that get condensed down and we can then analyse them afterwards. 

We can then get the samples from the air sampler and we can DNA sequence them. And by looking at the DNA sequence, we're able to identify exactly what is in the air. This is the intake, where the airborne spores and airborne biota are sampled within the air column above me.

Those particles are sampled into a specific little barcoded vial similar to the one that you can see here. Once we collect the spores from the spore trackers at the botanic gardens, we do a DNA extraction. Then we prepare a DNA library and we're at this stage now where we actually sequence that DNA to determine whether there was Myrtle rust in those four tracker samples we collected or not. 

This is a really amazing amount of data that's been generated for the first time in Australia, where we can actually see the load of different fungal spores that are being spread around and really correlate that to real-time data. 

This becomes a really valuable information stream that we can give them the heads up that something might be occurring and we are detecting it in the air and can you now have another look.