International Innes

The greatest breakthroughs in science often emerge from connections forged across boundaries. This is just a small number of the global scientific collaborations and projects fostered by our researchers to tackle humanity’s challenges. From urban research hubs to remote field stations, this is a story of shared knowledge, innovation and collective discovery

Locations: Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, Türkiye and South Africa

The MARPLE diagnostics methodology, developed at the John Innes Centre in collaboration with CIMMYT, is a portable near real-time diagnostics system for the devastating wheat rust pathogens. Using the handheld MinION nanopore sequencer, built by Oxford Nanopore, the MARPLE system analyses pieces of the pathogen’s genome to determine which strains are present in the region and can generate results in just two days. This information can be immediately integrated into early warning systems and disease management decisions, making it ideal for responding to crop disease emergencies.

MARPLE diagnostics has been monitoring shifts in wheat stem rust in Nepal

Locations: Chile and the USA

Professor Anne Osbourn, group leader and Fellow of the Royal Society, investigates plant natural product biosynthesis. Professor Osbourn’s team at the John Innes Centre tracked down and mapped the elusive genes and enzymes needed to produce the useful molecule QS-21, naturally produced by the Chilean soapbark tree (Quillaja saponaria) and used to make vaccines more effective. The team collaborated with American genomics experts to determine the genome sequence of soapbark. Professor Osbourn’s team then elucidated the entire QS-21 pathway and reconstituted it in Nicotiana benthamiana, a wild relative of tobacco. This led to a collaboration, supporting a group in California to engineer this pathway into yeast.

Locations: Japan, Germany and the Netherlands

Professor Antony Dodd, group leader, leads a lab that investigates the adaptation of plants and microorganisms to fluctuating environments, focusing on circadian regulation and signal transduction. The John Innes Centre, LMU Munich, and Leiden University secured an ERC Synergy Grant to take forward their ground-breaking research. Their project, MicroClock, follows the recent discoveries by this collaboration of biological or circadian rhythms in the non-photosynthetic soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis.

Location: USA

Genetically modified, high-anthocyanin purple tomato seeds are available for home gardeners to purchase for the first time in the United States, having launched in February 2024. More than 1,200 seed packets sold within 48 hours of launch, and 9,600 sold in the first week. First produced by Norfolk scientists nearly two decades ago, the seeds are now produced by Norfolk Healthy Produce, a subsidiary of Norfolk Plant Sciences founded by Norwich Research Park scientists Professor Cathie Martin FRS and Professor Jonathan Jones FRS.

Location: UK

The Centre for Microbial Interactions represents one of the world’s largest concentrations of microbiologists on a single site, with more than 100 microbiology research groups based at the Norwich Research Park. Six partner institutions, the John Innes Centre, The Sainsbury Laboratory, Earlham Institute, Quadram Institute, the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, have collaborated to launch and fund the centre, one of the most globally important sites for microbiology.

Location: China

A five-year collaborative, cross-institutional collaboration with the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen completed whole genome sequencing of the A.E. Watkins Landrace Collection, a historic collection of locally adapted strains of wheat which are no longer grown anywhere in the world. Complementing next generation gene discovery populations developed and characterised in BBSRC’s cross institutional wheat programme, Watseq data showed that modern wheat lacks 60% of the beneficial traits available in Watkins. This is delivering new varieties of wheat to sustainably feed a growing global population.