News from the John Innes Centre

[Department for Business, Innovation and Skills press release] Professor Giles Oldroyd of the John Innes Centre has been awarded £2.5M from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) to begin developing cereal crops that can ‘fix’ their own nitrogen, making their own fertiliser. This is part of £20M of funding for synthetic biology projects [...]

In two papers to be published in Current Biology, researchers from JIC and The Sainsbury Laboratory on the Norwich Research Park, and Rothamsted Research and the University of York identify genes that help plants interact with microbes in the soil. Professor Giles Oldroyd of the John Innes Centre explains how plant roots form beneficial interactions [...]

The John Innes Centre will lead a $9.8m research project to investigate whether it is possible to initiate a symbiosis between cereal crops and bacteria. The symbiosis could help cereals access nitrogen from the air to improve yields. The five-year research project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, could have most immediate benefit [...]

In celebration of the first ever International Fascination of Plants Day with over 39 countries taking part, the John Innes Centre home to some of the best plant scientists in the world asked some of them, amongst other things, why plants? What is that fascinates them about plants and what is it they want to [...]

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. [...]

The genome of Medicago, a close relative of alfalfa and a long-established model for the study of legume biology, has been sequenced by an international team of scientists, capturing around 94 per cent of its genes. The research gives new insights into the evolution of the Papilionoid subfamily of legumes, which includes peas, soybean and [...]

At the end of this month, the world’s population will reach 7 billion; 1 billion are hungry, and 1 billion more are malnourished (http://tinyurl.com/3ngkyrt). In the next decades, there will be more humans. Limited land and water, costly energy for fertilizer, and climate change will ensure that more of them are hungry. Politics, economics and lack [...]

[University of Bristol Press Release] ‘Plant scientist’ should take its rightful place beside ‘doctor’, ‘lawyer’ and ‘vet’ in the list of top professions to which our most capable young people aspire, according to a hard-hitting letter by an international group of botanists and crop scientists. The letter calls for a radical rethink of our approaches to plant [...]