[Chris Schofield:] The BBSRC has a central role to play in UK science.
It's the one institute that really focuses on funding basic biological science.
As history shows,
if you do that and wait long enough,
the chances of making a difference to society at large are high.
The work on oxygenases has taken us from the mechanisms by which antibiotics are made,
or biosynthesized,
right through to how humans and other animals sense oxygen.
The BBSRC Sparking Impact work concerns the finding that these oxygenase enzymes occur,
not only in animals, but in bacteria.
And they have the potential to change the activity of antibiotics.
The BBSRC Sparking Impact Award was really to see
whether this basic scientific discovery will be useful for anything
-- if it would be useful either for improving existing antibiotics,
or making new antibiotics,
or whether we could exploit, for therapeutic benefit, the fact that
ribosomes might be differentially modified in healthy and diseased tissues;
for example, for cancer.
[Gail Preston:] The modern bioscientist has to collaborate with..
chemists, with mathematicians, with engineers,
in order to develop new technologies,
in order to handle the very large volumes of data that are being generated,
in order to develop a deeper understanding of what's going on.
So, it's critical that both the scientists who are working as academics at the moment
and the students that they are training
are aware of a wide range of different disciplines
and have the communication skills
to communicate across different disciplines
and make the most of the opportunities that are there for them.
We were able to organise an event here in Oxford
to which we invited academics from across the University,
partners from various research institutes
and a number of representatives from industry,
as well as current students,
to come along and learn about some of the exciting sciences going on supported by the BBSRC
-- the number of new collaborations we've made.
We were also able to tell the organisations who were attending the event
about our plans for the programme:
what we're doing with the programme at the moment,
what our hopes are for the future.
And we catalysed a lot of enthusiasm around the programme.
[Ben Davis:] We've been working, for a few years, on a remarkable signalling system that...
-- inside most plants --
allows the plants to change the way they distribute products of their metabolism,
which often end up going to things that are crops --
wheat and potatoes and so forth.
By working with some great guys at the Rothamsted Institute,
we found molecules that we can drip onto the plants, which are released by light.
So when sunlight hits the molecules inside the plant,
they start to be released and they start to affect the way the plant behaves,
and then it changes -- it allows the plant to do new things:
make more of its crop or resist things like drought.
We originally had a big Je-S BBSRC grant.
The idea was just to fiddle, just the test mechanism,
to validate the biological hypotheses using chemistry.
Then as things became more and more successful,
we tried to think about useful ways that this could be translated.
The Sparking Impact programme allowed us to do a key piece of chemistry,
to make enough of a compound that would then allow us to partner with an agricultural company
who were interested in taking this into crops and really applying it on a large scale.
[Denis Filer:] BRAHMS is an acronym for Botanical Research And Herbarium Management System.
It's a database management tool which is used to catalogue information about plant species
and to try to describe and define the diversity of plants globally.
The taxonomic work is where you're working on a particular group of plants,
maybe a family or a genus of plant,
so we look at all the different species in that group
and bring all the data together
and these are then used to help analyse distributions.
The other type of work we do is floristic -- looking at all the plant species that occur in particular areas.
That might be a large area, such as a country, which would lead to a flora,
or it might be a small forest reserve,
it could be an area being developed by a mining company,
or to plant sugar for biofuels.
In these cases, we survey, categorise and document
all the plant species that occur in these areas.
And we can use this data to evaluate their value in terms of conservation status.
We work in herbaria such as this one here,
with often many millions of plant specimens.
We also work in botanic gardens and, to a lesser extent, in seed banks.
[Tim Pearce:] I've been working with the BRAHMS project now for 25 years
and I've seen it grow from the ability to manage herbarium specimens
all the way through to now managing plots, wild plots, DNA samples, plant uses.
My particular interest is how to manage the data that goes along with the seed collections that we make.
If you've got good quality data,
you can store the data well;
you can manage it well;
you can question it well;
and you can share it well
-- you can make it available to people that want it
at the right time and at the right place.
Then you're doing good business.
And that's why we feel that the type of work that the BRAHMS project does,
the type of tool that it's developing,
is so vitally important for our conservation work here at Kew.
[Denis Filer:] Through the BBSRC grant, we've developed stronger relationships with Kew Gardens in London
and also with the equivalent in the Netherlands:
The Naturalis or The National Herbarium of the Netherlands.
As a result of BBSRC help, we've managed to get a full-time programmer based at Kew,
and we've got help also in Leiden in the Netherlands.
BRAHMS has been more or less freely available to everybody.
But we're tightening up on that a bit now
so that larger projects are expected to contribute.
And both of those things together -- the extra development support...
and the increased income -- will make the product much more sustainable.
[Paul Smith:] The Museum of Natural History is one of the largest science museums in the UK,
with around 700,000 visitors a year.
The Sparking Impact money will fund a pilot project
to develop a new series of exhibitions on contemporary science.
What we're going to do for the first exhibition
is choose a theme of 3 BBSRC-funded projects
all loosely based around biological sensing.
We're going to use that as the platform to test
this idea of communicating contemporary science.
It's about effective science communication.
It's about giving the opportunity for scientists to reach the public
and tell them what research they're doing,
but also the importance of that research to society in general.
What we also want to do is
use the opportunity of the opening of the exhibition
to have stakeholder networking events.
So, at the start of the exhibition what we'll do is bring in stakeholders from across government,
from policymakers, from industry,
for a one-day symposium.
The Sparking Impact funding has been absolutely crucial to establishing this project.
We hope it's a project that will run for many years into the future.
But what the BBSRC funding has done is provide that initial startup funding,
to run the pilot, experiment with the overall concept,
and test which bits work and which bits need some fine-tuning.