News from the John Innes Centre

Professor Enrico Coen from the John Innes Centre has been awarded €2.5M EU funding to explore the growth and evolution of carnivorous plants. “Carnivorous plants turn the normal order of nature upside down, eating animals instead of being eaten by them,” said Karen Lee, a researcher working on the project at the John Innes Centre. [...]

Plants and microbes produce a wide spectrum of natural products, which give them their huge range of colours, flavours and scents. These chemicals are used to repel pests, diseases or competitors or to attract pollinators, but for humans they represent a potential source of new medicines, flavourings, antimicrobials or other useful compounds. A major area [...]

Sixteen of Norfolk’s most talented budding scientists recently took the opportunity of getting inside the science on the Norwich Research Park by attending a series of talks and activities with some of the leading researchers working on the park.  The ‘Inside Science’ scheme, now in its 5th year, invited applications from the most gifted and [...]

The Chris Lamb Training Suite at the John Innes Centre was officially opened on 26th May 2011. As well as using cutting-edge science to understand how plants and microbes work, part of the JIC’s mission is to train new scientists to become the scientific leaders of the future. This new facility provides a resource for [...]

Over 2000 people visited Science in Norwich Day at the Forum in Norwich on Sat 19th March, the finale to National Science and Engineering Week. The day was officially opened by Laura McGillivray, Chief Executive Officer at Norwich City Council and Jon Tickle, from TV’s Brainiac and Big Brother.  This started with a performance of [...]

JIC Director, Prof Dale Sanders, provides an overview of the JIC’s Scientific Research Programmes

Scientists at the John Innes Centre and the University of East Anglia are pioneering a powerful combination of computer modelling and experimental genetics to work out how the complex shapes of organs found in nature are produced by the interacting actions of genes. Their findings will influence our thinking about how these complex shapes have [...]

Gardeners could help maintain bumblebee populations by growing plants with red flowers or flowers with stripes along the veins, according to field observations of the common snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus, at the John Innes Centre in the UK. Bees are important pollinators of crops as well as the plants in our gardens. The John Innes Centre, [...]