Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

A thale of wonder: Professors Neil Baker (left) and Phil Mullineaux, from the University of Essex’s Department of Biological Sciences, hope to use the thale cress as a model in a bid to increase the ability of crops generally to withstand climate and other environmental change

Described by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council as a ‘revolution in the way bioscientists think and work,’ systems biology is intended to make the outputs of bioscience research more useful and easier to apply in the real world, as well as advancing our understanding of biological processes.

It brings together researchers from different disciplines combining theory, computer modelling and experiments and has been the subject of around £100m of investment over the last three years by the UK Research Councils, making the UK a world leader in the area.

Four groups from the region are involved in three of the six projects to be funded by the BBSRC – including £2.8m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council – which aim to provide help to a range of biomedical and agricultural problems.

The University of Essex will collaborate with Warwick and Exeter universities on a £5.06m project to develop models of how plants cope with environmental stress – highly topical as climate change promises to bring changing pathogen populations and more extreme environmental conditions.

Essex’s cut is over £850,000 and focuses on one humble plant, thale cress, as this small plant has adapted to climate conditions across the Northern Hemisphere and its rapid life cycle, as well as the small size of its genome, or gene composition, make it an ideal model organism for study of this kind.

Professor Phil Mullineaux, co-leader of the Essex team, said: “Our long-term goal is to use these models to select for plants that are more robust in their response to the increasing environmental pressures that they face to sustain our production of food.”

Norwich’s John Innes Centre and the University of East Anglia are undertaking a £3.38m project to understand the dynamics and genetic controls that underlie shapes in biology and aim to do this by analysing and modelling leaf growth.

The project will study the factors involved in leaf growth at multiple levels – subcellular, cellular, organ and plant. These will be integrated to generate a model of leaf growth and shape in a model plant.

Modern bioscience research generates massive amounts of data that are stored in diverse data collections and Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire will help a £2.7m, three-year project to develop a robust open-source software system for integrating Life Science data by extending the ONDEX data integration platform.