News from the John Innes Centre

  Receiving his first microscope hooked Professor Mike Bevan on biology. He has pioneered insights taken up by the crop biotech industry and with his current work aims to increase food production.    Did an outdoorsy upbringing in New Zealand help spark your interest in science? I was brought up on a remote sheep farm [...]

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 [...]

John Innes Centre scientists have led a project to unlock the genetic code of wheat, one of the world’s three most important crops. This first analysis of the exceptionally complex and large wheat genome, published today in Nature, is a major breakthrough that will help to breed wheat varieties with higher yields and better able to cope [...]

An international team led by Norwich Research Park scientists have been awarded a grant to tackle one of wheat’s worst enemies, yellow rust. This is part of a unique £16M initiative, involving 40 international research organisations, which will harness bioscience to improve food security in developing countries. The grants have been awarded by the Biotechnology [...]

The BBSRC funded Wheat Improvement Strategic Programme (WISP) aims to identify new and useful genetic variation to support the vital contribution of wheat breeding to food security. The aim of this BBSRC funded course is to offer training in the genetic analysis methodologies employed in WISP at the John Innes Centre.  The participants will gain [...]

The use of new genomic techniques and increased sequencing power promise to help breeding crops, but for wheat the pipeline from the laboratory to the field is held up by wheat’s complex genome and the lack of the kind of detailed genome sequence available for simpler plants. Dr Martin Trick and Dr Cristobal Uauy have [...]

Dr Simon Griffiths has received over £500,000 of funding from the 7th framework program for research from the European Commission, to investigate ways that wheat can be adapted to cope with climate change. The project, which involves working with plant breeders, will focus on the way wheat times when it flowers, and look at how [...]

Two new research projects announced today (21 December) aim to make an important contribution to global efforts to breed improved cereal crops. The projects hope to shed further light on the genomes of wheat and barley, the two most widely grown cereal crops in the UK. Researchers hope that this will provide breeders with the [...]