News from the John Innes Centre

A PhD student from the John Innes Centre recently got the chance to showcase their work to an audience of MPs and leading scientists at the House of Commons.  Alaa Aljabali from the Department of Biological Chemistry was selected for the SET for Britain poster exhibition, organised by The Parliamentary and Scientific Committee.  The aim [...]

Science from the John Innes Centre recently featured on the front cover of the journal Integrative Biology, in a special edition focussing on Synthetic Biology. Prof Dave Evans’ group, in collaboration with Prof George Lomonossoff, have been able to chemically modify the Cowpea Mosaic Virus (CPMV) particle with peptides that cause a specific mineralization process.  [...]

Scientists are using designs in nature from extreme environments to overcome the challenges of producing materials on the nanometre scale. A team from the UK’s John Innes Centre, the Scripps Research Institute in California and the Institut Pasteur in Paris have identified a stable, modifiable virus that could be used as a nanobuilding block. Viral [...]

What have Black-eyed peas got to do with nanotechnology? As well as sharing their name with a chart-topping U.S. band, Black-eyed peas (also known as Cowpeas) are being used by scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich (JIC) [1] to grow virus particles that can be decorated with a chemical turning the particles into [...]