探花直播 of Cambridge - Beverley Glover

Four Cambridge researchers awarded prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grants

jg533 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 10:01:02 +0000

探花直播European Research Council (ERC) has announced today the award of 255 Advanced Grants to outstanding research leaders across Europe, as part of the EU鈥檚 Horizon Europe programme. Four 探花直播 of Cambridge researchers are amongst those to receive this prestigious and competitive funding.

探花直播探花直播 of Cambridge鈥檚 grant awardees are:

Professor聽Albert Guill茅n i F脿bregas in the Department of Engineering for his project Scaling and Concentration Laws in Information Theory.

Guill茅n i F脿bregas, who has previously received ERC Starting, Consolidator and Proof of Concept Grants, said: 鈥淚 am truly delighted with the news that the ERC will continue to fund my research in information theory, which studies the mathematical aspects of data transmission and data compression.

鈥淭his project will broaden the theory to study arbitrary scaling laws of the number of messages to transmit or compress." Read more about Professor Guill茅n i F脿bregas' project here.

Professor Beverley Glover in the Department of Plant Sciences and Director of Cambridge 探花直播 Botanic Garden, for her project Convergent evolution of floral patterning through alternative optimisation of mechanical parameter space.

Glover said: 鈥淭his funding will enable us to explore how iridescent colour evolved repeatedly in different flowers. We think it will shed new light on evolution itself, as we think about the development of iridescence structure from a mechanical perspective, focusing on the forces acting as a petal grows and the mechanical properties of the petal tissue.

鈥淚t's only possible for me to do this work because of the amazing living collection at Cambridge 探花直播 Botanic Garden, and I'm thrilled that the ERC is keen to support it."

Professor Ian Henderson in the Department of Plant Sciences for his project Evolution of the Arabidopsis Pancentromere.

Henderson said: 鈥淭his project seeks to investigate enigmatic regions of the genome called the centromeres, using the model plant Arabidopsis. These regions play a deeply conserved role in cell division yet paradoxically are fast evolving.

鈥淚 am highly honoured and excited to be awarded an ERC Advanced grant. 探花直播advent of long-read sequencing technology makes addressing these questions timely. 探花直播ERC鈥檚 long-term support will allow us to capitalise on these advances, build new collaborations, and train postdoctoral researchers.鈥�

Professor Paul Lane in the Department of Archaeology, for his project Landscape Historical Ecology and Archaeology of Ancient Pastoral Societies in Kenya.聽

Lane said: 鈥淧astoralism has been an extraordinarily resilient livelihood strategy across Africa. This project provides an excellent opportunity to reconstruct how East Africa鈥檚 pastoralists responded to significant climate change in the past, and to draw lessons from these adaptations for responding to contemporary climate crises in a region that is witnessing heightened water scarcity and loss of access to critically important grazing lands.鈥�

鈥淭his project will allow us to utilise the department鈥檚 world-leading archaeological science laboratories and expertise to answer crucial questions about past patterns of mobility, dietary diversity, climatic regimes and food security among East African pastoralists over the last fifteen hundred years. This has never been attempted before for this time period.鈥澛�Read more about Professor Lane's project here.

Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the 探花直播 of Cambridge said: 鈥淢any congratulations to Albert, Beverley, Ian and Paul on receiving these prestigious and highly competitive awards. It is fantastic that their ambitious, cutting-edge research will be supported by the European Research Council, marking them as outstanding European research leaders.

鈥淣ow that the UK is an associated country to Horizon Europe I encourage other Cambridge researchers to also consider applying to the ERC and other Horizon Europe programmes.鈥�

President of the European Research Council Professor Maria Leptin said: 鈥淐ongratulations to the 255 researchers who will receive grants to follow their scientific instinct in this new funding round. I am particularly happy to see more mid-career scientists amongst the Advanced Grant winners this time. I hope that it will encourage more researchers at this career stage to apply for these grants.鈥�

探花直播ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research.聽探花直播255 ERC Advanced Grants, totalling 鈧�652 million, support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields from medicine and physics to social sciences and humanities.

探花直播European Commission and the UK Government have reached an agreement on the association of the UK to Horizon Europe, which applies for calls for proposals implementing the 2024 budget and onwards.

探花直播ERC Advanced Grants target established, leading researchers with a proven track-record of significant achievements. In recent years, there has been a steady rise in mid-career researchers (12-17 years post-PhD), who have been successful in the Advanced Grants competitions, with 18% securing grants in this latest round.

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探花直播funding provides leading senior researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

Many congratulations to Albert, Beverley, Ian and Paul... It is fantastic that their ambitious, cutting-edge research will be supported by the European Research Council, marking them as outstanding European research leaders.

Anne Ferguson-Smith

探花直播text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright 漏探花直播 of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways 鈥� on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Getting maximum calories in shortest time is the priority for bumblebees

jg533 — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 15:05:06 +0000

A new study investigating nectar drinking in one of the most common bumblebees in the UK,聽Bombus terrestris, has found that when foraging they maximise the amount of nectar sugar they take back to the colony each minute.

To make their choices, the bumblebees trade off the time they spend collecting nectar with the energy content of that nectar. This means they will forage to collect nectar that鈥檚 hard to access 鈥� but only if the sugar content of that nectar makes it worth doing so.

This big-and-fast approach contrasts with honeybee foraging: honeybees make their decisions by optimising their individual energy expenditure for any nectar they collect. This more measured approach should prolong the honeybee鈥檚 working life.

鈥淎s they forage, bumblebees are making decisions about which nectar sources will give the greatest immediate energetic return, rather than optimising the energy efficiency of their foraging,鈥� said Dr Jonathan Pattrick, joint first author of the report, who started the research while in the 探花直播 of Cambridge鈥檚 Department of Plant Sciences.

Pattrick, now based at the 探花直播 of Oxford, added: 鈥淥ur results allow us to make predictions about the sorts of flowers the bumblebees are likely to visit, which could inform the choice of which flowers to plant in field margins to support these important pollinators. It鈥檚 also relevant to crop breeders who want to make varieties that are 鈥榖etter鈥� for bumblebees.鈥�

探花直播results are published today in the journal iScience.

Over six months the researchers made 60,000 behavioural observations of the bumblebees, allowing them to precisely estimate bumblebee foraging energetics. It was painstaking work: each bumblebee in the study was watched for up to eight hours a day without a break.

探花直播team used vertically and horizontally oriented artificial flowers, with surfaces that were slippery and difficult for the bumblebees to grip.

A custom computer program allowed the team to measure the split-second timing as the bumblebees flew between the artificial flowers and foraged from them. This meant the team could track how much energy the bumblebees spent flying as well as how much they collected when drinking, and identify how the bumblebees decided whether to spend extra time and energy collecting high-sugar nectar from slippery flowers, or take the easier option of collecting lower-sugar nectar from flowers they could land on.

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鈥淚t鈥檚 amazing that even with a brain smaller than a sesame seed, bumblebees can make such complex decisions,鈥� said Dr Hamish Symington in the 探花直播 of Cambridge鈥檚 Department of Plant Sciences and joint first author of the report.

He added: 鈥淚t鈥檚 clear that bumblebee foraging isn鈥檛 based on a simple idea that 鈥榯he more sugar there is in nectar, the better鈥� 鈥� it鈥檚 much more subtle than that. And it highlights that there鈥檚 still so much to learn about insect behaviour.鈥�

Individual bumblebees were given one of three tests. In the first test, the nectar on both vertical and horizontal artificial flowers had the same amount of sugar, and the bumblebees made the obvious choice to forage from the horizontal flowers, rather than spend extra time and energy hovering at the vertical ones. In the second test, the nectar on the vertical flowers was much more sugary than the nectar on the horizontal flowers, and the bumblebees chose to drink almost exclusively from the vertical flowers.

In the third test, the vertical flowers offered nectar which was only slightly more sugary than the horizontal flowers. This created a situation in which the bumblebees had to make a trade-off between the time and energy they spent foraging and the energy in the nectar they were drinking 鈥� and they switched to feeding from the horizontal flowers.

探花直播results show that bumblebees can choose to spend additional time and energy foraging from hard-to-access nectar sources 鈥� but only if the reward is worth it.

Bumblebees drink nectar from flowers, then offload it in their nest 鈥� by regurgitation 鈥� for use by other bumblebees in the nest. Unlike honeybees, bumblebees only store a small amount of nectar in the nest, so they need to make the most of every opportunity to forage.

This research was funded by BBSRC.

Reference

Pattrick, J G et al: 鈥�Bumblebees negotiate a trade-off between nectar quality and floral biomechanics.鈥� iScience, Oct 23. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108071

Research has found that bumblebees make foraging choices to collect the most sugar from flowers in the shortest time 鈥� even if that means using more energy in the process 鈥� to provide an immediate energy boost for the colony.

It鈥檚 amazing that even with a brain smaller than a sesame seed, bumblebees can make such complex decisions.

Hamish Symington

Bumblebee foraging for nectar

探花直播text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright 漏探花直播 of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.聽 All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways 鈥� as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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This deceptive daisy remixed its genes to make fake lady flies

jg533 — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 15:29:21 +0000

Researchers have discovered how a South African daisy makes fake lady flies on its petals to trick male flies into pollinating it.

Celebrating the women of Cambridge: Part III

jek67 — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 07:45:24 +0000

Part III: To mark International Women's Day and Women's History Month, the 探花直播 is delighted to shine a light on some of the incredible women living and working here at Cambridge.聽

Cambridge experts on UK drought and climate change

lw355 — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 09:25:55 +0000

From pollinators to profits, food to fires, here's what Cambridge experts say about the impacts of water scarcity 鈥� and what it signals about our changing climate.

Cambridge experts on the UK heatwave and climate change

lw355 — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 09:08:06 +0000

From heatwave 'dismay' to the 'deadly' effects of climate change, here's what two Cambridge experts say about the UK's record-breaking temperatures.

Planting ideas: Botanic Garden opens access with living collections portal

ta385 — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 07:30:00 +0000

A new聽web portal to Cambridge 探花直播 Botanic Garden's聽entire living collection, 14,000 plants,聽aims to聽open access and fast-track urgent global research.

Call of the wild collector

lw355 — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 06:00:53 +0000

Walking at 鈥榖otanist pace鈥� on Mount Terror in South Africa, Dr 脕ngela Cano likes to stop and smell the succulents. She then measures, photographs, presses specimens and gathers seeds. Her work is helping to safeguard some of the rarest plants on Earth.