Horticulture is an important area for BBSRC, as evidence for instance by our Horticulture and Potato Initiative, and I was delighted to be able to attend this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, including (among hundreds) exhibits by the University of Nottingham, East Malling Research and Waitrose/NFU. We had given some sponsorship to the former, so it was particularly pleasing to see that they had been awarded an RHS Gold Medal for their stand.

I also attended the annual dinner meeting of the British Society of Plant Breeders, which was addressed by Lord de Mauley, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Resource Management, the Local Environment and Environmental Science (to name but three). [...]

Last week began with a visit to discuss Life Sciences and related topics at the University of Warwick, which also included discussions of horticulture, as part of the Warwick Crop Centre. Horticulture is a somewhat unheralded UK success story, in that it has had little investment, is rather profitable, and its products are widely recognised as having considerable health benefits. The application of modern biology to understanding and improving horticultural crops can only assist this continuing process.

Horticulture is thus an important Bioindustry, and I had an interesting session at the BioIndustry Association as part of their Parliament Day, where our discussions focussed on the best ways to capture the value for the biotechnology sector from the enormous amounts of knowledge and expertise in Higher Education and Research Institutes. [...]

Among last week’s meetings was one to discuss how we might best take forward our implementation of the Athena Swan arrangements, and in particular the development of requirements for our fundees to have done so (by applying for and achieving the necessary charter awards), probably in the manner set down by the NIHR for bids to become Biomedical Research Centres.

I managed to attend the dinner discussion of the first meeting of our new Exploiting New Ways of Working Panel, and also had a first meeting since his appointment with Tim Benton, the new Global Food Security Champion. [...]

The previous blog mentioned crop science and the John Innes Centre (meanwhile another broadsheet obituary for Chris Lamb has appeared), and the role of research in ‘biomedical agriculture’ to produce nutritionally enhanced plants. Continuing this latter theme, I paid a visit last week to Warwick HRI at Wellesbourne, formerly Horticulture Research International and prior to that the National Vegetable Research Station. Warwick HRI was once an institute of BBSRC (it is now part of the University of Warwick), and is a leading centre for research into important horticultural crops. I was introduced to several recent recruits, many from abroad, who described some very impressive work indeed. Horticulture is an important part of BBSRC’s landscape, especially given our interest in Food Security, and it was pleasing to know that this research area has a sound intellectual (and financial) base. The genome sequence of the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans has just been published online. I was pleased to note that several UK and BBSRC-funded institutes and laboratories – including Warwick HRI – have been able to participate in the experiments leading to this important milestone. [...]