Food security & environmental sustainability
This session will provide examples of our collaborative efforts that aim to improve food security, preserve biodiversity, and develop approaches for adaptation to climate change.
A major area of impact is in wheat research where we have been an integral part of the international effort to deliver the first full bread wheat genome. In both the UK and globally, this work is supporting ongoing annual increases in wheat productivity and reducing the impact of disease outbreaks.
Another example of our growing impact is in aquaculture where we are developing genomic resources for breeders, particularly in east Africa, and providing assistance to local communities aiming to develop sustained production of nutritious food and create opportunities for local employment.
Our research also contributes towards understanding the causes of pollinator decline which poses a severe problem for biodiversity and agriculture. By studying bee populations at the genetic level, we are helping to identify genetic changes that could be associated with population health and pollinator decline.
Improving Human Health
During this session we will share examples of collaborations aiming to improve our understanding of health and diseases.
Our research contributes towards public health through tackling the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) around the world, by tackling salmonella and multi-drug resistance through combining experimental and computational biology approaches.
Building on our expertise in long-read sequencing and understanding complex regulatory networks involved in gene expression, we are helping to identify potential new drug targets for human diseases such as schizophrenia, as part of the Psychiatry Consortium, a collaboration between pharmaceutical companies and research charities, convened and managed by the Medicines Discovery Catapult.
Our research towards understanding of gene regulation during cellular differentiation and ageing has potential to identify novel targets for drug development and preventative lifestyle modifications.
Enabling others to advance research and innovate
Building on our track record in developing data brokering platforms for large-scale projects, we enable large collaborative consortia like Designing Future Wheat and the Darwin Tree of Life to share and use data efficiently by providing bioinformatics services for data and software distribution, data sharing, and cloud computing.
Hosting a number of advanced sequencing platforms we specialise in testing new technologies and matching them to applications. The breadth of our experience with microbial, plant and animal genomes can add value to many genomics projects through to expert advice, experimental design and bespoke bioinformatics analysis.
Combined with our expertise in large-scale experimentation and synthetic biology we can help increase the speed and scale of research projects, increasing accuracy and reducing costs, such as in our collaboration on developing new industrial strains with Colorifix Ltd.
Our expertise and facilities for single-cell genomics can support a wide range of research activities helping to reveal previously unseen heterogeneity in living systems, measuring cell-to-cell genetic, epigenetic and transcriptomic variation. Working with Cytiva, we provided single-cell transcriptomic analysis supporting new product launch by generating data comparing the new device with other methods available on the market.
We are contributing towards closing the skills gap in data science, computational biology and technology development in genomics by sharing our expertise and tools through our advanced training programme. We also support talent development through DTP and MSc projects, internships and placements, and mobility exchanges. Many of our graduates and former employees transition to other organisations helping to embed new expertise and skills and build new collaborations.
