Autumn 2017 BusinessConnecting our science with industry, policymakers and society Advanced Agriculture How technology and innovation can transform food production Frontier bioscience Genome conference discusses latest discoveries Meet our Innovator of the Year Shelby Temple Tackling serious global challenges Working with India on advanced agriculture About BBSRC BBSRC invests in world- Our aim is to further scientific knowledge to meet major challenges, including food class bioscience research to promote economic growth, wealth and security, green energy and healthier, job creation, and to improve quality of life longer lives. Our investments underpin and training on behalf in the UK and beyond. important UK economic sectors, such as farming, food, industrial biotechnology of the UK public. Funded by Government, BBSRC invested and pharmaceuticals. over £473 million in world-class bioscience in 2015-2016. We support research and Further details about BBSRC, our training in universities and strategically science and our impact can be found funded institutes. BBSRC research and at www.bbsrc.ac.uk the people we fund are helping society Strategically funded institutes Front cover: PhD student Sarah-Jane Osborne downloading data from soil moisture sensors in a field trial on the Babraham Institute The Pirbright Institute Institute for Biological, The Quadram Institute Rothamsted Farm. www.babraham.ac.uk www.pirbright.ac.uk Environmental and Rural Studies www.quadram.ac.uk © Rothamsted Research (Aberystwyth University) www.aber.ac.uk/en/ibers John Innes Centre Roslin Institute Rothamsted Research Earlham Institute www.jic.ac.uk (University of Edinburgh) www.rothamsted.ac.uk www.earlham.ac.uk BBSRC is part of the Research www.roslin.ac.uk Councils UK partnership About Contacts BBSRC Business Plant health and agriculture [email protected] BBSRC Business is a controlled circulation magazine which is Animal health [email protected] distributed free of charge to Bioenergy [email protected] end users of research and to individuals with an interest Food [email protected] in BBSRC. Human health [email protected] For enquiries about Business contact the News Team: Industrial biotechnology [email protected] BBSRC Polaris House, North Star Avenue, International [email protected] Swindon, SN2 1UH. Tel: 01793 442810 Research technologies [email protected] Email: [email protected] Skills and training [email protected] For regular news about BBSRC and the outcomes and impacts of BBSRC- Innovation and business [email protected] funded research visit www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news 2 BBSRC Business Autumn 2017 In this issue Chief Executive Melanie Welham underlines the importance of continuing to support exciting frontier bioscience. Genome conference success It was pleasing to hear that hundreds of the world’s leading bioscientists and researchers gathered in Norwich for the first Genome 10K conference to be held outside the United States. Combined with the Genome Science 2017 conference, it presented the latest research and technological developments in genomics, with more than 300 delegates from 44 nations. Many projects funded by BBSRC were represented and discussed in a programme of fact full sessions with a wealth of speakers Frontier bioscience continues to be an lifeblood on which our understanding of all presenting the latest frontier developments important priority for us here at BBSRC. In living systems depends, and it is of huge in genome editing. You can see more about this issue you can read more about some importance to me that BBSRC continues to the event on pages 8 and 9. of the exciting research we are supporting, encourage and support frontier bioscience. including Dr Berthold Hedwig and his team Strategy for UK biotechnology and at the University of Cambridge, where they Tackling serious global challenges biological sciences are using crickets to understand how patterns In this edition you can also find out Finally, thank you to everyone who submitted of sound are recognised and processed by more about one of the most ambitious their views to the strategy. The big question nerve cells in the brain. international research programmes ever is where can and should biology take us in created. Leading experts from the UK and the next 20 years and what needs to be done Our Innovator of the Year, Shelby Temple, in developing countries across the world today to make it happen. is featured – find out how he is tackling the At BBSRC we take our role as a major investor challenge of turning The big question is where can and in bioscience very seriously and we seek to science into a commercial should biology take us in the next work with our community to champion and product. He is focusing lead bioscience in the UK. The strategy for his attention on making a 20 years and what needs to be done UK biotechnology and biological science is a device that could be used today to make it happen. key part in helping us set out the promise of by opticians as part of bioscience research and the steps needed to the normal eye test. Read make good on that promise. more about Dr Shelby Temple on page 12. are joining forces as the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) invests £225 million Our featured examples of the frontier across 37 projects to address challenges bioscience that BBSRC supports just scratch in health, humanitarian crises, conflict, the surface. Research which expands the environment, the economy, domestic our knowledge and understanding of violence, society, and technology. See page fundamental biological processes is the 18 for more information. BBSRC Business Autumn 2017 3 Headlines Industrial Strategy fund bioscience investment University of Leicester University BBSRC will be investing £16.5 million from the government’s flagship Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) to develop new agricultural technologies and industrial bioprocesses Banana crop study seeks to to drive the bioeconomy. The funding will be used to further advance new technologies, processes address global challenges and practices to advance the production of food, chemicals, materials Research focussing on the Ethiopian banana base with partners in low- and middle- and energy. could help improve food security in Ethiopia income countries to address key sustainable and other parts of Africa, especially in areas development challenges. The ISCF accelerates commercial affected by drought. exploitation of the most exciting Dr Amanda Collis, BBSRC Executive Director technologies the UK has to offer Researchers at the University of Leicester, of Science, said, “This investment will the world to ensure that scientific the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the address a number of different threats to the investment truly delivers economic University of Addis Ababa will work together sustainable production of safe and nutritious impact, jobs and growth right across the to better understand the banana crop food, ranging from tackling pests and country. species and its genetics. disease, examining human behaviours, and improving food safety and nutrition, through Universities, Science, Research and The project is part of the Global Challenges to the sustainability of agricultural soils and Innovation Minister Jo Johnson said, Research Fund (GCRF) to address key global the wider cultural and social context of food “This significant investment will support development challenges in securing future and farming. The complexity of the research pioneering bioscience research and food supplies. requires collaborative effort from a range development projects that will reduce A total of 35 individual projects – including of disciplines, and this is an exemplar of our reliance on carbon, boost the this one involving the University of Leicester – research councils coming together to address productivity of our nation’s crops and were awarded to 27 lead organisations. The broad international development research develop new world-leading agricultural awards connect the UK’s world-class research challenges.” technologies.” University of Oxford and Diamond Light Source, eBIC Plant-produced vaccines could help eradicate polio Plants have been used to produce a new This means that they mimic the behaviour vaccine against poliovirus in what is hoped to of the virus, stimulating the immune system be a major step towards global eradication to respond, without causing an infection of of the disease. poliomyelitis. A team of scientists at the John Innes Centre Laboratory tests demonstrated that the has produced the novel vaccine with a poliovirus mimics provided animals with method that uses virus-like particles (VLPs) – immunity from the disease, paving the non-pathogenic mimics of poliovirus which way for human vaccines to be produced by are grown in plants. plants on a major scale with the input of pharmaceutical industry collaborators. Genes that carry information to produce VLPs are infiltrated into the plant tissues. The Professor Lomonossoff, from the John host plant then reproduces large quantities Innes Centre, said, “This is an incredible of them using its own protein expression collaboration involving plant science, animal mechanisms. VLPs look like viruses but are virology and structural biology. The question non-infectious. They have been biologically for us now is how to scale it up – we don’t engineered so they do not contain the want to stop at a lab technique. nucleic acid that allows viruses to replicate. 4 BBSRC Business Autumn 2017 Headlines GM plants promise fish oils aplenty Metabolic engineers have moved a step the field, they have matched the seeds’ pressure mounts on traditional supplies of closer to sourcing fish oils from fields biosynthetic products more closely to those fish oils, which are vital nutrients for rather than from the oceans with a trio of of their marine counterparts, and they have human health. successful research findings that support identified the potential for even greater oil “Having a viable land-based source of the commercial cultivation of a transgenic storage in the seeds.