Australian Native Plants ─ Cultivation and Uses in the Health and Food Industries

This book is an important contribution to the literature of medicinal and nutritional plants. It introduces native food crops that are commercially grown in Australia that possess nutritional and health properties largely unknown globally. These native foods have been consumed traditionally, have unique flavor diversity, offer significant health promoting effects and contain useful functional properties. Australian native plant foods also have been identified for their promising antioxidant and antimicrobial properties that will have considerable commercial potential.

Yasmina Sultanbawa earned a graduateship in chemistry from the Institute of Chemistry, Ceylon, in Sri Lanka, an MSc in food science from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and a PhD in food chemistry from the University of British Columbia, Canada. After 15 years employment at the Industrial Technology Institute in Sri Lanka, she has worked for eight years as a senior food scientist at the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Queensland, the past five of which she has been a senior research fellow at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation, University of Queensland, Australia.

Fazal Sultanbawa earned a BSc and an MPhil in agriculture and crop science from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and a PhD from the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, focusing on biotechnology and the mass propagation of plants using tissue and protoplast culture. For the past five years, he has been technical manager at Agrichem Pty Ltd., Brisbane, Australia, a leading international plant nutrition company, where he is responsible for developing their crop nutrition programs, R&D programs, and the conduct of field trials. He also has held senior management positions in several national and international companies.