Last week a number of us spent the better part of three days visiting (and meeting members of) the many Institutions on the Norwich Research Park (NRP). There is a welcoming and increasing synergy of activities and coincidence of purpose, helpfully catalysed by the recent Budget announcement of the provision of a £26M investment for NRP campus developments. I also had the opportunity to see the new Training Suite, at the John Innes Centre named in honour of Chris Lamb, and the massive TGAC Data Centre which presently holds the world record as the largest computer (in terms of RAM) running Red Hat Linux, that was opened the following day. Such a machine gives us a world lead in terms of assembling short-read sequences for very large genomes such as that of wheat.

Wheat represents the second largest tonnage of grain crop in the world, and there are many traits that one would wish to improve. As part of the workshop on Biological strategies for enhanced carbon storage in agricultural soils, we heard many superb talks, including ones on how breeding might be able to improve below–ground biomass production and retention, methods for measuring root morphology in situ, developments in soil microbiology and metatranscriptomics, and a variety of talks summarising our knowledge – and more importantly our ignorance – of what controls the nature and magnitude of carbon fluxes to, in and from complex soil ecosystems (something referred to in part as ‘shovelomics’). Our plenary speaker was Jerry Glover from the Land Institute and USAID who summarised some of his (and others’) fabulous work on perennial crops. The clear message from the Workshop is that we have world-class scientists in each of the relevant disciplines that we need to develop novel crops and to understand existing ones for improving their carbon sequestration, and thus that the chief task is to bring them together to refine and cohere their ideas. Watch this space.

Following the Hargreaves review that I mentioned last week, the Research Councils and HEFCE announced their intention to work together on the Open Access agenda. Part of this of course involves making tools and data available, but ‘doing this’ does not mean necessarily doing it well. A useful article gives eponymous advice on Ten simple rules for providing a scientific web resource.

Not many of my own papers have come out yet this year, though I have just corrected the proofs of a review that updates knowledge and thinking in the area of pharmaceutical drug transporters (Kell DB, Dobson PD, Oliver SG: Pharmaceutical drug transport: the issues and the implications that it is essentially carrier-mediated only. Drug Disc Today 2011, in press). I also enjoyed reading a couple of articles summarising prospects for the biotechnological production of major chemicals, and another illustrating the rather wide divergence of metabolic networks in different strains of E. coli. Clearly, resequencing methods will enable us to extend such studies to other organisms.

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