Most of last week was taken up with a tour of some of the Scottish Universities. I started at the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh, where we had a hard-hat trip around the large and impressive new building being constructed as part of the Easter Bush Research Centre.

The next visit occupied nearly a full day at the Institute of Aquaculture (IoA) at the University of Stirling, where we saw a very wide range of facilities and projects including fundamental molecular genetics and genomics, breeding, nutrition, disease mechanisms and treatment, welfare and sustainability, applied to a wide variety of fish and shellfish species. Worldwide, aquaculture continues to grow significantly, since the nutritional benefits of eating fish are well known, and the correct species farmed effectively can be excellent and productive sources of high quality protein. A number of authors from the IoA contributed to one of the Open Access papers recently published in the Phil Trans special issue on Global Food Security. It is probably fair to say that general oversight of the prospects for agriculture focuses mainly on land-based crops and livestock, whereas – as an island nation if for no other reason – I do consider that we should be giving greater thought to increasing the role of aquaculture. The scientific opportunities are certainly very great.

From Stirling I visited the University of Dundee, home of a large and exceptionally successful College of Life Sciences (the University is also linked with the Scottish Crop Research Institute), where I necessarily saw only a small subset of the large range of activities. These include an extremely well-organised, integrated and productive early-phase Drug Discovery Unit, which has already (in a short time) shown itself capable of having a highly productive pipeline (I long ago blogged about some developments that bring at least some aspects of early phase drug discovery within the compass of the academic laboratory). I also had some very useful discussions about emerging data standards for imaging data from live cell microscopy and related studies, driven considerably by the Open Microscopy Environment. My attention was drawn in particular to a very useful recent paper setting out both the present state and the coming agenda.

Finally I visited the University of Aberdeen, where I presented our general vision as encapsulated in the BBSRC strategic plan, and in return was given excellent summaries of a wide range of activities in marine biology, physiological energetics, soil biology and C sequestration for linking the climate change and food security agendas, systems biology, ageing, stress responses and nutrition (the Rowett Research Institute of Nutrition and Health is now part of the University).

Scotland receives more BBSRC funds than does any other region (albeit that this is in part a function of how a region is defined…), and had pioneered the ‘pooling’ concept in organisations such as SULSA most effectively. A recent investment in and pooling of resources in marine science, the MASTS initiative, is already bedding down, and one could discern quite easily a culture of collaboration and facilities sharing that will likely need to be developed more effectively throughout the UK as times get tougher.

The rise in obesity is sometimes referred to as an epidemic, a term usually reserved for phenomena involving an infectious agent. I have long thought that many more diseases than usually construed actually have an infectious component, possibly involving a so-called ‘non-culturable’ organism. Now a recent paper offers tantalising links between childhood obesity and infection with an adenovirus (that if causal might influence obesity by enhancing differentiation that affects the activity of fat cells).

Data visualisation remains one of my interests, and this week the Guardian had some web visualisations of aspects of science research spending. I also enjoyed playing with a new visualiser for the outputs of the Facta semantic search engine for Medline abstracts. The theme here is of course computational methods for assisting the linking of different ideas and their display. A related paper on linking dispersed knowledge also pertains, as does one that I co-authored and that has just appeared, and as does another combing structural and systems biology methods to great effect in predicting drug off-targets.

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