In July 2009, a new national genome centre was unveiled in Norwich. It was opened by the genomics pioneer Prof Sir John Sulston and Sir Richard Jewson, the then Lord-Lieutenant of Norfolk, with a mission to “further the UK’s capacity in genomics”.
15 years later and the Earlham Institute is a thriving hub of multidisciplinary life science research, innovation, training, and impact.
Our mission is to decode the scale and complexity of living systems so we can understand, benefit from, and protect life on Earth.
It means, every single day, people working in or alongside the Institute are addressing the most urgent global challenges - climate change, food security, biodiversity loss, and human health and wellbeing.
Technological advances in genomics and computational bioscience have widened our horizons - breaking down traditional barriers between disciplines and expanding the scope and ambition of research questions we can answer.
I’m proud to say the Earlham Institute has been at the heart of many of these developments and has a critical role to play in the future of data-intensive bioscience.
Our original remit of becoming a national centre of excellence in bioinformatics has seen major contributions to the generation, management, and curation of genomic data.
Since its inception, the Institute has been supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, part of UKRI. Today, we’re one of eight institutes across the UK in receipt of strategic funding from BBSRC .
We were originally founded as The Genome Analysis Centre, where the early vision was to address challenges around genomics capability and capacity within the UK life science community.
Sequencing the genomes of socially or economically important plants, animals, and microbes generated valuable data. Interpreting that data provided valuable knowledge for academic and industry partners.
Research wasn’t a significant part of our original brief but, if you aren’t doing your own research in an area, you can never remain at the cutting edge.
The transition from genomics facility to investigator-led research institute came in around 2015-2016, and was soon followed by both a rebrand as the Earlham Institute and the first of our BBSRC-funded strategic research programmes.
In relative terms, we’re still a young institute but there have been many impacts over the past 15 years - spanning publications, pipelines, software, career development, public engagement, and political advocacy.
We were an integral part of the international effort to deliver the first full bread wheat genome, decoding this hexaploid crop from sequence to assembly and annotation.
Our scientists mapped the wheat epigenome and are now revealing the effects of introducing genetic variation from wild relatives.
What started out as a single platform in a lab has flourished into an active single-cell group, contributing cutting-edge research, delivering training, and pushing the boundaries of nascent approaches such as spatial transcriptomics.
Our original remit of becoming a national centre of excellence in bioinformatics has seen major contributions to the generation, management, and curation of genomic data.
We continue to develop FAIR approaches and standards, alongside the development of tools to simplify the preparation of metadata for upload alongside research data.
This work, alongside our role in the Elixir community and BioFAIR project, is crucial in realising the enormous potential of data across a wide range of disciplines.
I’m also immensely proud of the collective response during the pandemic. We loaned equipment and expertise, promoted the idea of local testing, ran pilot projects, and leveraged our amazing people and infrastructure to deliver Covid-19 testing for thousands of local NHS staff.
In these challenging times, our people demonstrated the determination, innovation, and community spirit that has always defined the Institute’s culture.
Thanks to the remarkable people working in every part of the Earlham Institute, the future is incredibly exciting and we find ourselves ideally positioned to help shape the field of data-intensive bioscience.
Last year, the Earlham Institute was awarded £31.4m of funding from BBSRC to support the delivery of two ambitious programmes of research; Cellular Genomics will transform our understanding of genome variation and regulation at a cellular level and Decoding Biodiversity will help to harness the power of large genome datasets.
The funding also powers two National Bioscience Research Infrastructures (NBRIs) - Transformative Genomics and the Earlham Biofoundry. These don’t just provide the UK bioscience community with access to platforms and expertise; they’re run by talented and innovative teams who are pioneering the application of the latest technologies to generate new biology.
We’re also a key partner on Delivering Sustainable Wheat, another BBSRC-funded strategic research programme, led by the John Innes Centre.
In the coming years, we’ll see a greater adoption of AI and machine learning approaches in research. We’re growing our expertise and collaborations to lead this transition and have recently spun out our first company, TraitSeq, which applies these new tools to genomic data.
Work to characterise soil and plant microbe interactions will gather pace, a key part of our strategic research programmes and a focus for several of our researchers and key collaborators.
The Institute will also lead a move away from data silos to an open data ecosystem, where the adoption of FAIR approaches and linked research data will accelerate all life science research nationally and internationally.
Thanks to the remarkable people working in every part of the Earlham Institute, the future is incredibly exciting and we find ourselves ideally positioned to help shape the field of data-intensive bioscience.
The Earlham Institute is based within the Norwich Research Park and is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UKRI, as well as support from other research funders.
