The John Innes Centre receives strategic funding from BBSRC
The John Innes Centre receives strategic funding from BBSRC
News ReleasesEuropean Commission earmarks €12 million for plant growth research28th June 2006 Contact: Plants are invaluable sources of food, medicine, renewable materials and energy. But we still know relatively little about the biological processes that make them grow. AGRON-OMICS is a plant research consortium that includes John Innes Centre scientists John Doonan, Mike Bevan and Sean Walsh. The goal of the 5-year initiative in collaboration with nine other top European research institutes is to understand the network of biological processes involved in leaf growth. Plants are essential to our daily life; they provide us with food, medicine, and renewable sources of materials and energy. It’s therefore sobering to realise that, in comparison to cancer for example, we still know very little about the mechanisms involved in plant growth. Given their crucial role for mankind, it is vital that we improve our knowledge about the biology of plants. AGRON-OMICS (Arabidopsis GROwth Network integrating OMICS technologies) will conduct an in-depth study of leaf growth in the model plant species Arabidopsis thaliana. Over the next five years, this network of major European players in plant biology will perform experiments to identify the molecular components controlling growth and build mathematical models to explain how these components interact. The significance of the initiative caught the attention of the European Commission, which is providing €12 million toward its success. With the exception of the Arabidopsis genome initiative, this is arguably the largest grant ever awarded in this area of research, and a clear indication of the social importance of a deep understanding of life processes in plants.
For further information and to arrange interviews with the scientists involved please contact Dr Vicky Just, JIC Press Office: +44 (0)1603 255111, victoria.just@jic.ac.uk The JIC, Norwich, UK is an independent, world-leading research centre in plant and microbial sciences with over 800 staff. JIC carries out high quality fundamental, strategic and applied research to understand how plants and microbes work at the molecular, cellular and genetic levels. The JIC also trains scientists and students, collaborates with many other research laboratories and communicates its science to end-users and the general public. The JIC is grant-aided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. http://www.jic.ac.uk Additional information is available via the project website: Appendix: Partners in the AGRON-OMICS Project Coordinator: VIB-UGent, Belgium John Innes Centre, UK Institut National de Recherche Agronomique, Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin,
France Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology, Germany Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland Laboratoire d’écophysiologie des plantes sous stress environmentaux,
France Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Germany Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Germany Warwick Systems Biology Centre, University of Warwick, UK Plant Research International, The Netherlands Universidad Miguel Hernandez, Spain Maia Scientific, Belgium Unité de Recherche en Génomique Végétale, France
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