Field Trials Capabilities at the John Innes Centre

The John Innes Centre's capabilities in plant genetics are greatly enhanced by the availability of facilities that permit studies on genetic stocks under agricultural conditions.

The Centre has access to three trial sites, all owned by the John Innes Foundation. There are 10 hectares of trial grounds adjacent to the Centre and at Newfound Farm, on Colney Lane, a further 50 hectares of light, freely draining soil suitable for disease and stress trials.

In 1999, Church Farm, Bawburgh (2 miles west of JIC) was purchased to provide 170 hectares. of high quality agricultural land suitable for producing heavy yields of cereals, peas and brassicas. This site is being improved by adding a secure barn for seed and equipment storage, field laboratories for preparing and processing seed samples and the installation of an irrigation system to facilitate artificial inoculation of disease trials. The development of Church Farm will allow large-scale trials of peas, oil-seed rape, wheat and barley to be carried out under simulated farm-scale conditions. This will enable quantitative trait (QTL) analysis of agronomically important traits, particularly yield potential, under realistic agricultural practice. When combined with genomic studies in model species and crops, this knowledge can be translated into advanced plant breeding technologies.

The trial sites also enable field studies of disease epidemiology and disease reactions under realistic, but controlled, agricultural conditions, to underpin JIC's research on host-pathogen interactions. The sites are an essential part of our programmes to develop genetic and genomic tools. In particular they allow us to grow, and screen, large M2 and M3 populations from mutagenised diploid and hexaploid wheats, barley, peas, oil-seed rape, Medicago truncatula, Lotus, and Antirrhinum in order to identify new mutant phenotypes. At Church Farm we will be maintaining and multiplying the UK cereals collections, the European pea collection and the precise genetic stocks of peas and cereals that the Centre curates as national germplasm resources.