Dr Chris Morgan has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship to carry forward his exciting investigations into the mysteries of meiosis. 

From October Dr Morgan will take the important first steps towards becoming an independent group leader at the John Innes Centre when he begins the eight-year Royal Society University Research Fellowship. 

The fellowship is designed to give long-term funding to outstanding researchers who can become leaders in their scientific area and reap the benefits of exciting discoveries made in their early career. 

Director of the John Innes Centre Professor Graham Moore FRS said: “This Fellowship award is wonderful news. Chris’s innovative work addresses a critical knowledge gap in the field of genetics and may offer practical applications for feeding a growing global population in the face of climate change.” 

For Dr Morgan, the Fellowship offers an opportunity to continue his ground-breaking work in unraveling the mechanisms behind meiosis, the cell division process in which sex cells – sperm and eggs in humans, pollen and egg cells in plants – are produced. 

A key component of meiosis involves crossovers, when chromosomes from parent cells pair and exchange large segments of DNA to create new combinations of genes in the next generation. These DNA exchanges are essential for generating genetic diversity, the driving force for evolution, and their frequency and position along chromosomes are tightly controlled.  

Despite more than a century of research, the cellular mechanism that determines where, and how many, crossovers form has remained unclear.  

In collaboration with the group of Professor Martin Howard at the John Innes Centre, Dr Morgan, recently made an exciting breakthrough by identifying a new mechanism which ensures that crossover numbers and positions are ‘just right’: not too many, not too few and not too close together.  

This mechanism has been coined ‘the coarsening model’ for crossover patterning, due to the dynamic build-up of protein clusters at particular sites along chromosomes. Similar coarsening processes underlie, for example, the swelling of rain drops in clouds or the growth of ice-crystals in ice-cream.   

During his fellowship Dr Morgan and his colleagues will perform experiments in plants to test the coarsening model, pursuing new hypotheses unlocked by this novel way of thinking. 

Experiments will probe why crossovers are suppressed in certain regions of the wheat genome: a feature that hampers plant breeding and the development of new crop varieties with beneficial traits.  

A further focus will be why meiosis is so sensitive to high temperature stress and, as a result, crucially affects plant fertility and yield in major crops. 

Wheat fertility and yield is highly influenced by temperature – particularly in the initial stages of meiosis – and high temperatures at this stage of development can result in major crop losses. 

“The generous eight-year funding provided by The Royal Society will enable me to pursue major questions in the field of meiosis research and to build my own independent research group at the John Innes Centre,” said Dr Morgan. 

“I’m extremely grateful to all my colleagues who have supported me in my career so far and helped me on my way to securing this award.”