The first part of last week was spent at the superb Bioeconomy in action meeting (twitter @bioeconomy_dk) arranged under the auspices of the Danish Presidency of the EU. Recognising the integrated nature of the bioeconomy that starts with the plant-based (and possibly algal) photosynthesis of biomass and creates high value products, speaker after speaker saw this as the vision for the creation of sustainable growth and jobs. The meeting was far too broad and detailed to repeat all of the messages, but some came through both strongly and regularly, such as the need to integrate farmers into the vision for food and non-food crops, the importance (stressed especially by Ruud Lubbers, ex-Prime Minister of the Netherlands) of taxing net CO2 production, and the key role of scientific research in effecting sustainable intensification of agriculture and subsequent biotransformations. The decline in manufacturing in the UK in favour of financial ‘services’ means that we are a little behind parts of Europe, but the situation is retrievable as we are at the beginning of the transition (back) to a bioeconomy. Many processes are already operating at scale, e.g. a huge bio-succinate plant for bioplastics built by Novamont in Italy, and the very large IAR Cluster biorefinery in the Champagne-Ardenne and Picardy regions of France. Neither did the meeting forget the importance of nutrition in a healthy lifestyle, and the likely diabesity epidemic if we do not act. Overall, an inspiring meeting, and it is worth giving the link http://ec.europa.eu/research/bioeconomy/index_en.htm to the European Bioeconomy website explicitly.
Continue reading: Bioeconomy in action and Innovators of the Year

Last week was an unusually celebratory one, in that I attended a number of functions that involved celebrations of UK and more general scientific endeavours. One function, including a flash-bang pyrotechnic display and sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry, was arranged at the House of Commons to celebrate the launch of the International Year of Chemistry. Another at the University of Manchester celebrated the award of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics to Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, while on Tuesday I attended the launch of the astonishingly comprehensive and authoritative Global Food and Farming Futures Foresight report.  I also attended the annual celebration of the BioIndustry Association, also attended by the winners of the Biotechnology YES competition that we co-sponsor.
Continue reading: Celebrating scientific successes

My first engagement last week involved a meeting with our Integrative and Systems Biology Strategy Panel, with some pleasantly wide ranging discussions. This week the major International Conference on Systems Biology, and the 10th in the series, ICSB 2010, is being held in the UK (in Edinburgh), where I anticipate a strong showing from BBSRC-funded researchers. (Sadly I can attend for only one day, where I am co-chairing a pair of linked sessions with Uwe Sauer on Systems Biology and Metabolism.)

Another meeting involved discussions of sustainable digital infrastructure (and an eponymous paper has just appeared), a topic that will likely be part of next week’s blog.
Continue reading: Systems and synthetic biology and omics

Biology is the nanotechnology par excellence – 4 Gigayears of evolution have seen to that – and recent work has highlighted the ability of DNA to fold itself into unusual shapes (held together mainly by H-bonds) with interesting machine-like properties – see e.g. recent papers from the laboratories of Ned Seeman and Milan Stojanovic. DNA aptamers also have interesting and complex binding properties, and I have recently published on a first complete landscape thereof. But it is proteins, with a choice of 20 rather than just 4 building blocks, that give the evolutionary tinkerer or design engineer the greater scope for protein engineering. Nowadays this means not only the engineering of proteins – important in industrial biotechnology – but engineering with proteins, to make interesting and potentially useful structures (with or without catalytic properties) by molecular self-assembly.
Continue reading: Nanotechnology, science Olympiads and clusters

Among last week’s engagements was the excellent launch of our joint programme (with DfID and the Scottish Government) entitled Combating Infectious Diseases of Livestock in Developing Countries (more manageably: CIDLID). Livestock are often the chief assets of the rural poor, and their diseases can consequently be particularly devastating. CIDLID will provide ca £13M of research investment via 16 grant proposals, each  involving researchers based in the UK and in appropriate developing countries. As with the eradication of Rinderpest (considered to be worth $1Bn per annum), to which we contributed significantly (PDF), the potential gains could be huge.
Continue reading: Combating infectious diseases, photographs and memristors