̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Ottoline Leyser

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser appointed as new Chief Executive of UKRI

cjb250 — Thu, 14 May 2020 11:29:24 +0000

Announcing her appointment, Business Secretary Alok Sharma from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said: “Professor Leyser’s appointment comes at a critical time for the UK. ̽��ֱ��coronavirus pandemic has shown the importance of science for our future and UKRI has a vital role to play in this.

“As the new Chief Executive, Professor Leyser will drive forward UKRI’s mission to create the great British companies of the future and help keep the UK at the cutting edge of global research and development.

“I would like to thank Sir Mark Walport for his dedication to UKRI, leading its transformation programme and championing science, engineering and technology across the UK.”

Science Minister Amanda Solloway said: “I am thrilled with the appointment of Professor Leyser and I look forward to working closely with her to drive forward our shared ambition to boost our world-leading research and development.

“Since its launch in 2018, UKRI has gone from strength to strength. Professor Leyser has already led a highly collaborative lab in her previous role which will be a great skill to bring to UKRI as it embarks on a new stage of exciting evolution.”

Dame Ottoline has a long-term interest in inclusiveness and engagement in science and has driven many initiatives to support an open and collaborative research culture that delivers high quality research that is both valuable and valued. This includes ongoing work to improve research culture. She has for a long time been actively engaged in science policy, currently chairing the Royal Society’s Science Policy Expert Advisory Committee and serving on the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.

In 2017 Professor Leyser was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to plant science, science in society and equality and diversity in science. Her own research has resulted in major advances in our knowledge of plant development and includes pioneering work in studying hormonal control of shoot branching through interdisciplinary approaches.

Dame Ottoline, who is also a Fellow of Clare College, said: “UKRI has a unique opportunity to make a profound contribution to tackling the many challenges facing the world.

“In my career, I have seen the power of genuinely collaborative cultures to catalyse the transformative thinking needed to create effective solutions.

“I look forward to working with the UKRI team to ensure that the UK’s superb research and innovation system continues to work for everyone, by pioneering new partnerships, developing innovative funding models and strengthening international collaboration.”

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “I warmly congratulate Ottoline on her appointment. She is an extremely well respected colleague and will make a very worthy successor to Sir Mark Walport.

“ ̽��ֱ��unprecedented challenges facing our society at present, in particular the coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis, demonstrate why investment in research and innovation has never been more important. With her passion for research, understanding of the sector and willingness to engage with government, Ottoline will be in a strong position to steer UKRI at this crucial time.”

Lord Grabiner QC, Master of Clare College, added: “On behalf of the Fellows, staff and students of Clare College, Cambridge I am delighted to congratulate Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser on her appointment as CEO at UKRI. Ottoline is one of our most distinguished Fellows and is well equipped to meet the significant challenges she will be presented with.”

Dame Ottoline will take up her position on 29 June 2020, replacing Sir Mark Walport, who is standing down. Professor Henrik Jönsson will take over as Acting Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory.

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser DBE FRS, the distinguished plant scientist and Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has been named as the new Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the national funding agency investing in science and research in the UK.

I look forward to working with the UKRI team to ensure that the UK’s superb research and innovation system works for everyone, by pioneering new partnerships, developing innovative funding models and strengthening international collaboration

Ottoline Leyser

Sainsbury Laboratory

Ottoline Leyser

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Opinion: GM crop ruling shows why the EU’s laws are wholly inadequate

fpjl2 — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 08:05:08 +0000

̽��ֱ��European Court of Justice has made an important ruling on genetically modified crops. Since 2003, new crop varieties produced by genetic modification have had to be assessed for their risks to the environment and human and animal health before they can be farmed in the European Union.

̽��ֱ��court has now decided that genetic modification includes any technique that induces genetic changes “in a way that does not occur naturally”. This includes new genome editing techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9, but also approaches that have been used in plant breeding since the 1960s.

Some scientists have criticised the court for “shutting the door” on new technologies that could benefit human health and the environment. This is certainly a concern. ̽��ֱ��ruling will discourage the use of genome editing that could bring significant environmental benefits by making it more expensive for such such crops to clear the necessary regulatory processes.

But the main problem illustrated by this ruling is the deep logical flaw in the whole regulatory approach. Plants that have been bred in more traditional ways, which could have just as serious health or environmental impacts, will continue to be exempt from regulation. Focusing on how a new crop is produced – rather than the new characteristics or agricultural practices it brings – will inevitably result in wholly inadequate protection for the environment and consumers.

Every new crop variety is genetically different from its predecessors. A lot of genetic variation can arise naturally from errors in DNA copying, mutations caused by environmental factors, cross breeding with wild relatives, viruses and many other sources. All this variation is excluded from the EU definition of GM.

To increase genetic diversity and generally speed things up, scientists can induce mutations deliberately. Random mutagenesis – purposefully encouraging genetic mutations, for example with radiation – has been used on crops since the 1960s. It has since become possible to add specific new genes, sourced from the same or different species. And, even more recently, genome editing techniques have been developed that allow scientists to alter selected existing genes. These more recent approaches are becoming ever more useful as we build up our understanding of which genes do what.

All these techniques can be used to introduce new traits into a crop variety, for example to make a plant resistant to herbicides. ̽��ֱ��new court ruling came about because a group of farming organisations who were worried about the impact of herbicide resistant crops argued they should be regulated regardless of how they were developed.

This seems to me entirely reasonable. There are of plenty of arguments and counterarguments about the risks and benefits of this approach to weed control – and it is important to assess these before introducing a new herbicide resistant crop. None of these arguments have anything to do with how the crop was produced.

Yet the court ruling means that herbicide resistant crops produced through conventional breeding can be used freely, while crops produced using newer approaches must be subjected to intense scrutiny. So the farming groups might be happy that a new generation of herbicide resistant crops will have to be extensively assessed for their environmental and health impacts. But herbicide resistant crops produced by traditional methods, which raise identical concerns, will remain exempt from these regulations.

Natural’s not in it

This highlights the central problem with the EU regulations on new crop varieties. Anything that could occur naturally is exempt from scrutiny. Yet drawing a line between the natural and artificial is difficult to say the least. After thousands of years of careful human intervention, most “natural” crops look nothing like their wild ancestor. They have many characteristics that mean they would not last more than a few generations if they had to compete in the wild.

One of the reasons we have spent so long breeding them is that many natural plants carry serious risks. Very few people would say to their children: “Go into the woods and eat anything you can find. It’s all natural so it must be good for you.” ̽��ֱ��distinction between natural and artificial is both contrived and not relevant when it comes to environmental and health impact assessment.

We should assess new crop varieties on the traits they are supposed to deliver, not on how those traits were introduced. ̽��ֱ��system needs to be proportional and risk-based. This should of course include consideration of the unintended effects of whatever genetic improvement process was used. Instead we spend years debating whether or not a new technique counts as genetic modification or not. That this is even a relevant question lays bare the flaws in our current approach.

This article has been republished from ̽��ֱ��Conversation.

A new EU ruling that attempts to draw a line between natural and artificial when it comes to crop production has a "deep logical flaw" at its heart, writes Professor Ottoline Leyser, Director of the ̽��ֱ��'s Sainsbury Laboratory.

We should assess new crop varieties on the traits they are supposed to deliver, not on how those traits were introduced

Ottoline Leyser

Fernan Federici

Ratiometric measurement of gene expression

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Opinion: ̽��ֱ��science ‘reproducibility crisis’ – and what can be done about it

cjb250 — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 09:57:15 +0000

A survey by Nature revealed that 52% of researchers believed there was a “significant reproducibility crisis” and 38% said there was a “slight crisis”.

We asked three experts how they think the situation could be improved.

Open Research is the answer

Danny Kingsley, head of the Office of Scholarly Communication, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��solution to the scientific reproducibility crisis is to move towards Open Research – the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as it is practical in the discovery process. We need to reward the publication of research outputs along the entire process, rather than just each journal article as it is published.

As well as other research outputs – such as data sets – we should reward research productivity itself as well as the thought process and planning behind the study. This is why Registered Reports was launched in 2013, where researchers register the proposal and how the research will be conducted, before any experimental work commences. It allows editorial decisions to be based on the rigour of the experimental design and increases the likelihood that the findings could be replicated.

In the UK there is now a requirement from most funders that the data underpinning a research publication is made available. However, although there are moves towards open research, many argue against the sharing of data among the research community.

Questionable findings are often hidden. Shutterstock

Researchers often write multiple papers from a single data set and many fear that if this data is released with the first publication then the researcher will be “scooped” by another research group, who will publish findings from similar data sets before the original authors get the chance to publish follow up articles – to gain maximum credit for the work. If the publication of data itself could be recorded as a “research output”, then being scooped would no longer be such an issue, as such credit will have been given.

One benefit of sharing data could be an improvement in its quality – as previous research has shown. And there have been small steps towards this goal, such as a standard method of citing data.

We also need to publish “null” results – those that do not support the hypothesis – to prevent other researchers wasting time repeating work. There are a few publication outlets for this, and a recent press release from ResearchGate indicated that it supports the sharing of failed experiments through its “project” offering. It lets users upload and track experiments as they are happening – meaning no one knows how they will turn out.

Psychology is leading the way out of crisis

Jim Grange, senior lecturer in psychology, Keele ̽��ֱ��

To me, it is clear that there is a reproducibility crisis in psychological science, and across all sciences. Murmurings of low reproducibility began in 2011 – the “year of horrors” for psychology – with a high profile fraud case. But since then, ̽��ֱ��Open Science Collaboration has published the findings of a large-scale effort to closely replicate 100 studies in psychology. Only 36% of them could be replicated.

̽��ֱ��incentive structures in universities and the attitude that you “publish or perish” means that researchers prioritise “getting it published” over “getting it right”. It also means that some, implicitly or explicitly, use questionable research practices to achieve publication. These may include failing to report parts of data sets or trying different analytical approaches to make the data fit what you want to say. It could also mean presenting exploratory research as though it was originally confirmatory (designed to test a specific hypothesis).

However, many psychology journals now recommend or require the preregistration of studies which allow researchers to detail their predictions, experimental protocols, and planned analytical strategy before data collection. This provides confidence to readers that no questionable research practices have occurred.

Erasing data: a questionable research practice. Shutterstock

Registered Reports has taken this further. But of course, once results are produced, isolated findings don’t mean much until they have been replicated.

I make efforts to replicate results before trying to publish and you’d be forgiven for thinking that replication attempts are common in science, but this is simply not the case. Journals seek novel theories and findings, and view replications as treading over old ground which offers little incentive for career-minded academics to conduct replications.

This has also led to the introduction of Registered Replication Reports in Perspectives on Psychological Science. This is where teams of researchers each follow identical procedures independently and aim to replicate important findings from the literature. A single paper then collates and analyses them to establish the size and reproducibility of the original study.

Although psychology is leading the way for improvements with these pioneering initiatives, it is certainly not out of the woods. But it has started to move beyond a crisis and make impressive strides – more disciplines need to follow suit.

This is a publication bias crisis

Ottoline Leyser, director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Reproducibility is a fundamental building block of science. If two people do the same experiment, they should get the same result. But there are many good reasons why two “identical” experiments might not give the same result such as unknown differences that have not been considered – and some exciting discoveries have been made this way.

So if a lack of reproducibility is itself not necessarily a problem, why is everybody talking about a crisis? In some cases poor practice and corner cutting have contributed to lack of reproducibility, and there have been some high profile cases of out and out fraud. It’s a major concern, but what is causing it?

In 2014 I chaired a project on the research culture in Britain for the Nuffield Council on bioethics, which was motivated by concerns about research integrity including over-claiming, rushing prematurely to publication and incorrect use of statistics. ̽��ֱ��main conclusions were that poor practice is incentivised by hyper-competition with overly narrow rules for winning.

There is an excessive focus on the publication of groundbreaking results in prestigious journals. But science cannot only be groundbreaking, as there is a lot of important digging to do after new discoveries – but there is not enough credit in the system for this work and it may remain unpublished because researchers prioritise their time on the eye-catching papers, hurriedly put together.

̽��ֱ��reproducibility crisis is actually a publication bias crisis which is driven by the reward structures in the research system. Various approaches have been suggested to address problems, such as pre-registration of experiments. However, the research landscape is highly diverse and this type of solution is only sensible for some research types. ̽��ֱ��most widely relevant solution is to change the reward structures. In the UK there is a major opportunity to do this by reforming the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Through the REF, public money is allocated to universities based on the “quality” of the four best research outputs, usually papers, produced by each of their principal investigators over approximately six years and it disproportionately rewards groundbreaking research.

We need reward for a portfolio of research outputs, including not only the headline grabbing results, but also confirmatory work and community data sharing, which are the hallmarks of a truly high quality research endeavour. This would go a long way to shifting the current destructive culture.

Ottoline Leyser, Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge; Danny Kingsley, Head, Office of Scholarly Communication, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and Jim Grange, Senior Lecturer in psychology, Keele ̽��ֱ��

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Reproducibility is the idea that an experiment can be repeated by another scientist and they will get the same result. It is important to show that the claims of any experiment are true and for them to be useful for any further research. However, science appears to have an issue with reproducibility.

NIAID

Study of Human Immune Response to HIV

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Celebrating 10 years of European research excellence

ag236 — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 12:40:43 +0000

When European government representatives met in Lisbon in the year 2000, and expressed an aspiration that Europe should become the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010, they agreed on the need to create a body to “fund and co-ordinate basic research at European level”.

This was the impetus underlying the creation, in 2007, of the European Research Council (ERC).

Ten years after its foundation, the ERC has become a European success story. It has supported some 6,500 projects through its prestigious grants, and has become a unique model for the fostering and funding of innovative academic research.

To mark the anniversary, events are being held across Europe during ERC Week, running from 13-19 March. At the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, various recipients of ERC grants will be sharing their findings with a wide audience in talks scheduled as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

̽��ֱ��McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research will be joining in ERC Week celebrations by hosting a conference on Thursday, 16 March.

On the same day, a reception for Cambridge recipients of ERC grants, attended by ERC president Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, will be held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is currently showing the ERC-supported exhibition, “Madonnas and Miracles: ̽��ֱ��Holy Home in Renaissance Italy”.

̽��ֱ��ERC supports outstanding researchers in all fields of science and scholarship. It awards three types of research awards (Starter, Consolidator, Advanced) through a competitive, peer-reviewed process that rewards excellence. Its focus on “frontier research” allows academics to develop innovative and far-reaching projects over five-year periods.

̽��ֱ��United Kingdom has been the largest recipient of ERC awards –between 2007 and 2015, it received 24% of all ERC funding.

To date, the ERC has supported 1524 projects by UK-based academics. Researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have won 218 of those grants, in fields ranging from Astronomy to Zoology.

“What is special about an ERC grant?”, asks Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr, who was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for her project “IN-AFRICA”, which examines the evolution of modern humans in East Africa.

“An obvious side is that it’s a lot of money. But I think it’s more than just the money. Because it’s five years, the ERC grant allows you to get a group and build a real community around the project. It also allows you to explore things in greater depth.”

An ERC grant allowed Dr Debora Sijacki, at the Institute of Astronomy, to attract “a really competitive and international team, which otherwise would have been almost impossible to get.”

Being funded for a five-year period, she adds, “gives you time to expand and really tackle some of the major problems in astrophysics, rather than doing incremental research.”

It also allowed her access to facilities: “In my case, it was access to world-leading supercomputers. And without the ERC grant this would have been difficult.”

“Real progress in research is made when researchers can tackle big important questions," says Prof David Baulcombe, of the Department of Plant Sciences, the recipient of two ERC grants. " ̽��ֱ��ERC programme invites researchers to submit ambitious, blue-skies, imaginative proposals. There aren’t many others sources of funding that allow one to do that sort a thing.”

Dr Christos Lynteris, of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for his project “Visual representations of the third plague pandemic.

“An ERC is a unique opportunity," he says: “it fosters interdisciplinary work. It also fosters analytical tools and the creation of new methods.”

“It offers a great opportunity to work with other people, over a period of 5 years, which is something very unusual, and with quite a liberal framework, so you are able to change and shift your questions, to reformulate them. For me, it means freedom, above everything.”

For Prof. Ottoline Leyser, Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, it is the “ERC ethos” and its “emphasis on taking things in new directions” that has made all the difference.

̽��ֱ��ERC values an innovative, risk-taking approach “in a way that conventional grant-funding schemes don’t –they usually want to see that slow build rather than the risky step into the unknown.”

Prof. Simon Goldhill, Director of CRASSH, was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for his project “Bible and Antiquity in 19th Century Culture”. It has given him “the unique opportunity to do a genuinely interdisciplinary collaborative project with the time and space it takes to make such interdisciplinarity work.”

“Most importantly,” he adds, “the financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world, and Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.”

̽��ֱ��sentiment is echoed by Prof. Ruth Cameron, of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. ̽��ֱ��impact of an ERC grant for her project “3D Engineered Environments for Regenerative Medicine” has, she says, “exceeded expectations”.

So what has the ERC ever done for us? Quite a lot, say Cambridge academics, as they mark the 10th anniversary of Europe’s premier research-funding body

̽��ֱ��financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world. Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.

Prof. Simon Goldhill, CRASSH

Cambridge & the ERC: 10 years of research excellence

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̽��ֱ�� people recognised in 2017 New Year Honours list

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 22:30:00 +0000

Ottoline Leyser (above left) is Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory. She becomes a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to Plant Science, Science in Society and Equality and Diversity in Science.

Dame Ottoline’s research aims to understand how plants adjust their growth and development to suit the environmental conditions in which they are growing. In particular, she is studying how plants change the number of shoot branches they produce depending on factors such as nutrient supply and damage to the main shoot. She is particularly interested in the roles and mechanisms of action of plant hormones such as auxin. She is a Fellow of Clare College.

“This is a huge honour,” said Dame Ottoline. “It’s so uplifting that things I really care about can be celebrated in this extraordinary way. Science has such a lot to offer the world, which makes it really important that science is open to all, so that everyone can contribute to the process and benefit from the results.”

Shankar Balasubramanian (above right) is Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Fellow of Trinity College. He has been named a Knight Bachelor for services to science and medicine. He co-invented next generation sequencing which has provided the most transformative change in biology and medicine for several decades, and has led to the $1000 dollar human genome. He has also made important contributions to four-stranded DNA, known as G-quadruplexes, and their role in cancer.

“It is a great honour for me and a wonderful acknowledgement of the research and I have carried out in Cambridge with my co-workers and collaborators over the past two decades,” said Sir Shankar. “I was particularly pleased to see recognition of our basic science and its impact on medicine, as I am jointly appointed between the Departments of Chemistry and Medicine.”

Professor John Pyle, Head of the Department of Chemistry, is appointed CBE for services to Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science. Professor Pyle’s research uses of state-of-the-art numerical models, run on supercomputers, to study the processes controlling the present state of the atmosphere and its evolution. He is a Fellow of St Catharine’s College.

"I'm delighted, of course," said Pyle. "We are the best chemistry department in the country and one of the very best in the world. It's fantastic for the department to get recognition for that work."

Professor John Spencer, Bye Fellow in Law at Murray Edwards College, Life Fellow of Selwyn College and Professor Emeritus of Law, is also appointed CBE for services to the Reform of Law Concerning Child Witnesses. His interests include criminal law, criminal evidence, comparative criminal law, and the law of tort. He has been involved in a great many of projects for law reform, including as a Consultant to the Law Commission on a project to reform the hearsay rule in 1995; as a member of a committee of experts set up by the European Commission to study fraud on the Community finances, and as a member of the Home Office group that drafted “Achieving Best Evidence in Criminal Proceedings” (1999-2001). He was also a consultant to the Auld Review of Criminal Courts in 2001.

Professor Jane Francis, Director of the British Antarctic Survey and Fellow of Darwin College, is appointed Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for services UK Polar Science and Diplomacy. She was only the fourth woman in history to receive the Polar Medal in 2002. Since being appointed Director of BAS in 2013, she has had a dual role of ensuring UK scientific polar excellence and promoting British sovereign interests in Antarctica. As the first female Director, she has embraced gender diversity and has been an inspiration and influential figure in the British scientific establishment. She is globally recognised as a leader in Polar Science and has made a significant contribution to our understanding of palaeo-climates. She has also undertaken a wide range of international roles which further promote the UK’s polar interests and sits on polar science advisory boards for other countries.

Professor Peter Weissberg, former Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation and Fellow of Wolfson College, has been awarded a CBE for services to medical research and cardiovascular health. Prior to his tenure at the BHF, Professor Weissberg established the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Cambridge and spent ten years as the ̽��ֱ��’s first BHF Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine.

Distinguished members of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have been named in the 2017 New Year Honours list, announced today. Professor Ottoline Leyser, Professor Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor John Pyle are among those who have been recognised for their contributions to society.

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Predictive modelling of plant growth for food and fuel

lw355 — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:13:24 +0000

A search for answers to the mysteries of plant development lies at the heart of research at the Sainsbury Laboratory, a newly opened institute that was made possible by an £82 million grant from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. In due course, the Laboratory will house 120 research scientists focused on the multifaceted events that unfold from the moment a single plant egg cell is fertilised.

Understanding plant development is both a fascinating and vitally important intellectual challenge, as Professor Elliot Meyerowitz, the Laboratory’s inaugural Director, explained: “ ̽��ֱ��answers will not only enhance our fundamental understanding of life, they will also have important application to a critical problem that faces the world today – how to feed and fuel a growing population with limited resources of land, water and energy.”

Scientists know some of the structures involved in how a plant develops – the machinery for processing DNA information and the basis of cellular behaviour, for instance. Less is known about the complex communication network that exists across the plant as a whole. ̽��ֱ��movement of small molecules between cells effectively enables plant cells to ‘talk to each other’ during development and to react to their environment.

“Our work aims to understand how plants ‘read-in’ their environment and ‘read-out’ this information as particular patterns of growth and development,” said Professor Meyerowitz.

Take, for example, branching in plants: how does a plant know where and when to form a branch from its stem, and why does pruning make a plant bushier? Professor Ottoline Leyser, Associate Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, discovered a hormone network that governs the process. Moving over long distances in the plant, the hormones provide a rich source of information that is then locally interpreted to regulate branching.

“It is this complex web of interaction that makes living organisms more than the sum of their parts,” added Professor Meyerowitz. “Even a small plant can have 10 million cells communicating in a whole variety of different modalities, chemical and physical. There may be 50 different types of plant cells, and each cell might have 30,000 different proteins that might associate and dissociate at millisecond scales, or even less.”

Professor Meyerowitz likens the approach the scientists will be taking to the computer-aided design process used for the Boeing 777 commercial aeroplane: “We’re not designing a plant – it’s already there – but we’re learning how it’s put together. We know what sort of data we want, and we know how to turn it into knowledge using computational models.”

Computational modelling and mathematical and engineering-based approaches will therefore feature strongly alongside expertise in genetics, cell biology, physiology and evolutionary biology within the Laboratory.

Predictive modelling

Professor Meyerowitz studies the genetics of flowering plants, especially the small laboratory plant Arabidopsis thaliana. His team was the first to identify and clone several flower development genes. Two decades ago, they pioneered the re-engineering of flower design, replacing the flowering organs with other organs – a potential 625 possible types of flowers. ̽��ֱ��scientists can already model many aspects of plant development and then test if the hypotheses about plant behaviour are correct. ̽��ֱ��future research of the Sainsbury Laboratory will be channelled into such models, with ever-increasing complexity. And, by elucidating the intricacies of plant development, the research will facilitate re-designing crops of the future.

“We’re aimed at 10 or 20, or even 50, years from now so that people can exploit the basic knowledge that we’ve generated, the way the basic knowledge of 30 years ago is being exploited now,” added Professor Meyerowitz. “We’re pretty sure we can figure out how plants develop. It’s not a dream.”

For more information, please contact Professor Elliot Meyerowitz (emm66@cam.ac.uk) at the Sainsbury Laboratory.

Fundamental research on plant development at the Sainsbury Laboratory will help in the future design of optimal crops.

Our work aims to understand how plants ‘read-in’ their environment and ‘read-out’ this information as particular patterns of growth and development

Professor Elliot Meyerowitz

Marcus Heisler

Live imaging of the growing tips of plants

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