The John Innes Centre is one of the world's leading centres for plant microbial research
so we address issues of food security, healthy aging and industrial biotechnology in our
research.
We have around 45 research groups, most of them are working on plants but we regard the
microbial work as equally important.
The strategic priorities are addressing issues such as food security where we focus not only
on the quantity and yield of crops but also on the quality and their resistance to pests
and pathogens.
As our climate changes we are experiencing the emergence of new pathogens of our crop
plants, particularly new fungal pathogens and new insect pests that are coming into
the UK and creating new challenges for stable food production.
Here at the John Innes we are identifying natural resistances that occur in the diversity
of, say, wheat and barley to breed those in, help breeding companies breed those resistances
into those crop plants so that we have naturally resistant crop plants to those new and emerging
pathogens and pests.
Growing more food in the same arable area we really need to increase productivity of
crops and that is going to require a lot of new technologies and new agricultural processes
to double the amount of food that we produce.
The big challenge is to be able to do that in a sustainable way and not increase the
global carbon footprint of the food that we consume.
One of the most important questions that we are working on at the John Innes Centre is
how to develop more sustainable agriculture and by this I mean agriculture that is not
so dependent on agricultural inputs for example, fertilizer which are potentially pollutants
or emitters of greenhouse gases.
One of the things that scientists are working on more specifically in this area is how to
develop cereals which are able to fix their own nitrogen.
This is a hugely ambitious protect and we don't expect to see it come to fruition for
another 20 to 30 years, yet if it does come to fruition, the pay-offs for society, the
benefits for society are enormous with respect to producing more sustainable agriculture.
This type of long range research programme wouldn't be possible without the strategic
grant that we received from the BBSRC which enables us to focus on long-term strategic
gains rather than short-term problems.
My research group has spent many years trying to understand how microbes cause disease on
plants and looking at interactions between plants and microbes and this is what led to
my interest in plant natural projects and their role in plant defence.
The reason for studying plant metabolism, there are many good reasons to study plant
metabolism.
Plant metabolism underpins yield, food, how plants make food, food quantity and food quality.
It influences how they interact with organisms, for example, pollinators, seed dispersal agents,
pests and diseases and, of course, it can be exploited in many ways.
Plants are a huge source of chemical diversity and their metabolism can be exploited to make
new fuels, industrial materials, pharmaceuticals as a source of enzymes.
There is a huge repository of potential.
At the John Innes Centre we have been around now for 100 years and this is very much founded
on genetics and the understanding of genetics and genetics is the foundations to plant breeding.
Plant breeding is what was perceived as a natural process of improving crop varieties
and something that has been going on since mankind started to develop their own crop
plants.
We have been selecting crop plants that give better yields under better environments and
in the last 100 years we have seen a marked improvement in our capability and speed by
which we can breed new crop varieties for the problems that we face and with new technologies,
particular genomics, we can greatly increase our capability to breed new varieties and
this is obviously very important because the speed by which we need to improve our crop
varieties is very short.
We need to keep improving crop varieties because we can't be complacent.
They succumb to disease, we're living in a time where climate change is a cause of great
concern, we don't know what the future will be like for crop plants, we don't know what
climate change will do for plant disease, we don't know what the impact of climate change
will be on plant metabolism so we can't sit still, we have to keep moving.
It is important to remember that the work we do at the JIC isn't just research, it is
also about training.
We have around 80 PhD students on site and those are the people who will be tomorrow's
scientists addressing tomorrow's problems.
We take our training aspects very seriously and give the students a wonderful research
environment in which they have not only state-of-the-art technical facilities but also a vibrant intellectual
environmental in which they can discuss ideas and interact with some of the world's leading
scientists.