This week was topped and tailed by University visits, the first being to the University of Exeter, who under the very able leadership of Vice Chancellor Steve Smith (who left Aber in 2002 at the same time as I did) and more proximately in Biology of Nick Talbot have grown their biosciences substantially and with great effect. Among the very interesting presentations were ones by Gero Steinberg, who (with his mathematical collaborator Peter Ashwin) has been developing and testing systems biology models (in a model organism, Ustilago maydis) of cytoskeleton-based trafficking that have completely changed their view of this. This was not an area I knew at all well, so it was illuminating to see this exciting combination of state-of-the-art cell imaging and numerical modelling. Murray Grant described a number of very interesting studies of plant defence, including new insights into the role of plant hormones, an improved knowledge of which aid considerably our work in Food Security, while John Love highlighted a programme co-funded by Shell in the area of third-generation biofuel production and Steve Bates, one of our New Investigator grantholders, described yeast cell cycle proteins that might make novel drug targets.

I stopped by briefly at our Committee meetings that were being held in Bristol, where I met a great many members, both core and pool, and in particular had the opportunity to thank most warmly our outgoing Committee Chairs Eleanor Riley, Alison Smith, Rob Beynon and Rod Hubbard for the fantastic jobs they have done, not least in helping guide us through the transition to the new Committee structures and working arrangements. I trust they will not suffer too many withdrawal symptoms.

One of my roles at RCUK is to be the CEO ‘Champion’ for the Research and Development Group, and I attended part of their monthly meeting this week, especially to participate in the discussion about optimal ways to fund large facilities and their usage over time.

Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline, in which we have for some time had significant interest as it is related to one of our core themes of systems biology (a field in which the UK will host the 2010 International Meeting). It is likely to contribute significantly in the future, not least to our programmes in bioenergy and industrial biotechnology. Like any technologies, it has also been seen as having the potential to raise ethical issues around the risk:benefit ratio. Through our Bioscience for Society strategy panel, we commissioned an independent review of ethical and other social issues, which was published last year. We have also worked with other funders and members of regulatory and advisory bodies to identify and address possible issues around how the UK regulatory system will handle the new technologies. As part of a major EPSRC-funded  programme at Imperial including the LSE BIOS Centre I attended a most interesting debate on this, moderated by Quentin Cooper of Radio 4’s Material World. A number of participants from the recent IGEM competition were present, and it was highly encouraging to see the UK enjoying considerable success in that competition. Synthetic biology was also the focus of a recent meeting (PDF) held by the Foundation for Science and Technology, and we had a useful discussion with them about possible future meetings. With EPSRC, and co-funding from Sciencewise-ERC BBSRC has  commissioned an independent public dialogue which will report in summer next year.   

Although we do not ourselves directly fund translational medicine, we fully recognise the potential of BBSRC Biology to contribute to this, and we had a couple of useful meetings with Dave Tapolczay and Mike Dalrymple from MRC Technology and with Sir John Bell, Chair of OSCHR and President of the Academy of Medical Sciences who have just published a very useful review on Rejuvenating Ageing Research (PDF), citing a report that I had missed (PDF) showing the exceptional economic returns from investment in biomedical research.

I have often blogged about digital information, and another subset of meetings revolved around that, including with Branwen Hide and Stephane Goldstein of the Research Information Network, with Lesly Huxley of the Exchanging Research Information Project, and with Elsevier. It is recognised that the move to Open Access requires that those maintaining the published resources are funded in some way, and  the latter provided some interesting information on how Open Access is being rolled out into the world of scientific publishing.  Slightly surprising (to me) was that ‘author-pays’ (arguably the easiest to implement) was not at all the only option being considered, with funder-sponsored articles and delayed free access (on a library-pays base) being popular in some areas. The Learned Societies will wish to take a view here.

It is widely recognised that next generation DNA sequencing methods require (and are driving) the production of new bioinformatics tools for the analysis of the data they produce, and an online review surveys some of them. Later this week I shall be speaking at the Digital Curation Conference on these and related issues.