News from the John Innes Centre

The John Innes Centre Receives Grand Challenges Explorations Grant For Groundbreaking Research in Global Health and Development Norwich, UK – The John Innes Centre (JIC) announced that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr Saskia Hogenhout, in collaboration with the Dr. Eduardo Bejarano from [...]

A new centre of excellence for plant and microbial research is planned in China following a joint symposium in Shanghai between researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the John Innes Centre. The symposium highlighted shared scientific goals that will drive the step change in agriculture needed to produce food sustainably in the future. [...]

Imagine a world without plants. We rely on them for everything, yet plants are often overlooked. Now, thousands of plant scientists, botanists, farmers and gardeners from all over the world are coming together to share their Fascination of Plants. On Friday May 18th the importance of having plants on our planet will be in the [...]

Barley grown in Scandinavian countries is adapted in a similar way to reindeer to cope with the extremes of day length at high latitudes. Researchers have found a genetic mutation in some Scandinavian barley varieties that disrupts the circadian clock that barley from southern regions use to time their growing season. Just as reindeer have [...]

Samantha Fox of the John Innes Centre blogs about the recent UK plant Systems Biology Workshop that she organised for the UK Systems Biology community The UK Plant Systems Biology Workshop took place on 20th April 2012 at the John Innes Centre. It brought together the growing community of UK systems biology researchers who use [...]

The use of new genomic techniques and increased sequencing power promise to help breeding crops, but for wheat the pipeline from the laboratory to the field is held up by wheat’s complex genome and the lack of the kind of detailed genome sequence available for simpler plants. Dr Martin Trick and Dr Cristobal Uauy have [...]

Zoe Dunford, Media Manager at the John Innes Centre, blogs about a session she hosted at the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) Conference 2012, on how science journals can support good science journalism  I now know a few words of pigeon “journal-speak”. And publishers are picking up the science journalist and press officer [...]

Academic research and large scientific businesses are sometimes seen as opposites, but together they are key to ensuring the economy gets maximum benefit from Government-funded research. On 18th-19th April the first UK PlantSci conference, held at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, helped to cross the gulf between pure research and the commercial world. The [...]