News from the John Innes Centre

Professor Caroline Dean recently wrote a blog article for The Independent website on how plants know when to flower. This was part of a series of blogs on Women in Science. Caroline also took her research to the streets of the South Bank in London as part of Soapbox Science. This event was organised by The [...]

Researchers led by Professor Caroline Dean have uncovered the genetic basis for variations in the vernalization response shown by plants growing in very different climates, linking epigenetic mechanisms with evolutionary change. Vernalization is a period of prolonged cold that some plants require before they will flower. This ensures that they only produce flowers after the [...]

JIC scientists have developed a new high-throughput method for extracting RNA from Arabidopsis plants. Advancements in plant molecular biology, particularly in studies of gene expression, mutant detection and trait mapping, mean that experiments are reliant on the analysis of increasing numbers of samples. High-throughput techniques for processing and analysing these samples are well developed. For [...]

New research from the John Innes Centre on how plants adapt their flowering to climate is also helping to unravel some of the mysteries of how genes are controlled. Until relatively recently genome sequencing projects, and studies of gene expression have mostly focussed on the messenger RNA transcripts produced from genes that contain the code [...]

John Innes scientist Caroline Dean OBE FRS has been elected a member of the USA’s National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for her excellence in original scientific research.  Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honours given to a scientist or engineer in the USA.  Professor Caroline Dean will be inducted into the Academy [...]

[BBSRC News Release]  Roses flowering at Christmas and snow-free ski resorts this winter suggest that climate change is already with us and our farmers and growers will need ways of adapting. Scientists studying how plants have naturally evolved to cope with the changing seasons of temperate climates have made a discovery that could help us [...]