A long-heralded and especially interesting engagement last week involved the launch of the funded outcomes of the multi-agency Insect Pollinators Initiative of which we were a significant part (and for which we provided the secretariat). This initiative – part of the Living with Environmental Change programme – was developed in response to the recognition that bees and other insect pollinators may well be in decline. What their true dynamics are is something we need to keep monitoring, and their numbers certainly exhibit potentially alarming annual fluctuations. Consequently, given the huge influence of insects as pollinators of major crops (most fruit and veg, forage legumes such as beans, and oleogenic crops such as oilseed rape) – potentially worth over £440M p.a. at a primary level (much more, I suspect if our crops actually fail, since such estimates are based on the results of present productivity) – it was very timely to improve what turns out to be a rather meagre scientific understanding of the details. [...]

It is reasonable to argue, and I have done so, that Science proceeds via an iterative process involving both analysis and synthesis. One of my pleasurable events this week was an invitation to the Rank Prize Fund awards, where both were in evidence. Lord Rank’s interests had covered both Agri-Food (“Rank Hovis McDougall” in my childhood and beyond) and cinematography (“The Rank Organisation”, famous for the gong, whose true audio history I heard at a lecture at school ca 1969 from Jimmy Blades and is here), and the awards are targeted to these areas.  The three sets of winners had (i) pioneered non-invasive methods for assessing lactation in vivo, (ii) worked out a significant part of the molecular basis of gluten intolerance, and (iii) were the originators of the excimer-laser-based corneal correction of vision. (I was especially interested in the latter, as during the 1970s my uncle had pioneered the development of ruby lasers in treating detached retinas.) [...]

I blogged previously (last 15 December) about some of the studies that are being carried out to try to understand the mechanistic bases for the variety of means by which bee colonies are disappearing (and we have announced a £10M initiative in this area). Some of these causes are likely to differ considerably, since while Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD, mainly in the USA) or Honey Bee Depopulation Syndrome (HBDS, in Europe) is characterised by a disappearance of the bees, other causes of death leave the bees dead in hives in situ. A genomic study in 2007 by Cox-Foster and colleagues suggested that Israeli Acute Paralytic Virus might be a major culprit, though inspection of the data was at least consistent with the view – and maybe more so – that a microsporidian fungus called Nosema ceranae might make more of a contribution to CCD. [...]

Bee and frog numbers are in decline, and we need to know why. Thus, understanding the dynamics of various species – the study of population biology and ecology – is an important component of BBSRC science, especially where this impacts agriculture. This kind of problem is in fact a classic subclass of problem common in systems biology, where many components may interact, we have little knowledge of the parameters or even the network topology of the system, and where the best we can usually do is to measure system variables. Since it is the parameters of the system that control and determine the time evolution of the (dependent) variables, how can we make progress? The answer is by using inferencing methods (including the methods of data mining and machine learning) that permit one to infer the structure and parameters simply from the measurement of such variables. This is then a data-driven or hypothesis-generating strategy (Kell & Oliver, 2004). The results of the hypothesis-generation step are then hypotheses that can be tested by making the most important inferred parameters independent variables in a subsequent experiment. [...]