News from the John Innes Centre

  The enthusiasm of a school biology teacher helped fuel Professor Mervyn Bibb’s own curiosity. Today, as antibiotic resistance nears a crisis point, his work to understand how soil bacteria produce antibiotics is more vital than ever. What sparked your interest in science? I have always been interested in the “natural world”, but it was [...]

Two scientists from the John Innes Centre have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society, the premier scientific accolade in the UK. Their breakthroughs in fundamental research have pioneered advances in antibiotic discovery and in crop improvement from which we all benefit. Professor Mike Bevan pioneered methods for expressing foreign genes in plants that [...]

A new project is investigating whether altering the production of an antibiotic will remove side effects preventing it being used clinically to battle drug-resistant superbugs. Tunicamycin is an antibiotic produced by the soil bacterium Streptomyces that was discovered 40 years ago. It works by blocking cell wall production in bacteria in a clinically novel way, [...]

Professor Mervyn Bibb of the John Innes Centre has been awarded the Heatley Medal and Prize by the Biochemical Society. Professor Dale Sanders FRS, Director of the John Innes Centre, said: “The JIC is proud to congratulate Merv Bibb on his award of the Heatley Medal.  This prestigious award was last won by Nobel Laureate [...]

A novel way of increasing the amounts of antibiotics produced by bacteria has been discovered that could markedly improve the yields of these important compounds in commercial production. It could also be valuable in helping to discover new compounds. With the ever-growing threat from antibiotic resistance, these tools will be very useful in ensuring that [...]

Scientists researching a new antibiotic have pieced together the way it is produced by a soil bacterium by working out the functions of its genes. Microbisporicin is produced by a soil bacterium from Indonesia called Microbispora corallina. A clearer understanding of how microbisporicin’s synthesis is regulated by the bacterium will provide the basis for finding [...]

PhD student Daniel Tromans has received the Heatley-Payne Award from the Society of General Microbiology, which has allowed him to travel to the US to carry out a short research visit and present his work at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM). Daniel is a second year Norwich Research Park PhD [...]

To help in the search for new antibiotics, Juan Pablo Gomez-Escribano and Professor Mervyn Bibb have adapted a strain of Streptomyces coelicolor to express clusters of genes found from genome sequencing projects whose functions are unknown. The increasing problem of resistance to antibiotics in a broad range of human pathogens means that we are in [...]