One major meeting of last week was our latest Audit Board meeting, that covered a variety of areas of importance to ensuring the orderly running of BBSRC, including scrutiny of our financial audits and of potential risks of various kinds.

We also had the last of our community ‘conversations’ at a well-attended venue in London, constituting the last of our ‘roadshows’ for this season. One topic which we trailed involved some plans for rolling out funding in Industrial Biotechnology, where we plan further open meetings in the new year; these were also one discussion topic of an extended internal strategy meeting that took place last week. [...]

Last week saw the penultimate of our ‘roadshow’ conversations, held in Glasgow and attracting participants from both Scotland and elsewhere. As ever we had a very useful exchange of thoughts on a wide range of topics, not least about how to streamline the peer review process, where some very helpful suggestions were made. In line with an interesting recent editorial, one question elicited discussion on the extent to which funding should be concentrated on (the typically more tractable)  model organisms, a question brought into focus by the comparatively little study devoted to Chalara fraxinea (the cause of ash die-back – here is a link on how to spot it) nor to thousands of other organisms. I won’t claim to have any answers here, but clearly folk may wish to give special thought to justifying the choice of organism in proposals.

I have blogged before about 3D printing, and a recent piece gives a nice example of how it can be used to save thousands on certain laboratory supplies. [...]

Last week we had our third ‘roadshow’ conversation at what had been the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, where again we enjoyed a very useful and helpful dialogue with our community. I also took part in a very useful meeting held by Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir John Beddington with a number of the Departmental CSAs and Research Council CEOs. These provide a very useful forum for topics where there is the potential for major cross-Government activity. An obvious area of present interest in the UK is the response of both the research base and regulators to the ash die-back disease cause by pathogenic variants of the fungus Chalara fraxinea, where BBSRC and partners had already initiated a call on Tree Health and Plant biosecurity. Hopefully by getting in early we can avoid the levels of tree loss seen with Dutch elm disease.

I also enjoyed a visit to Council member Jim Godfrey’s farm for a series of discussions of modern agriculture and the role of our research therein. It was very striking how very much science, and scientific approaches, do indeed contribute to modern successful agricultural enterprises. [...]

Last week, among many meetings in Swindon, saw one of our monthly meetings of the Research Council Chief Executives, including a very useful briefing from HEFCE Chief Executive Sir Alan Langlands about developments and thinking in the ‘other half’ of the dual-support system.

I spent a thoroughly enjoyable half-day at one of the periodic dissemination meetings of the Bioprocessing Research Industry Club (hashtag #BBSRCBRIC). Many first-rate and wide-ranging presentations (both oral and poster) covered everything from novel methods of membrane protein purification to flux balance analysis for predicting and improving recombinant protein productivity. On this latter, I was pleased to see the proofs of a paper to which I contributed, describing a new method for predicting metabolic fluxes – for instance for increasing them for industrial biotechnology. Not for the first time, I might comment that one can often go a very long way in silico, with minimalist but well-chosen experimental measurements to provide constraints! [...]

Last week began with a double header of our Remuneration Committee and the October Council meeting, the latter attended for a while by Minister of Universities and Science David Willetts. We have moved to an annual cycle of ‘themed’ Council meetings, and this time is was the turn of ‘developing impact’. A detailed multi-part presentation was accompanied by an excellent discussion of what the fostering of world-leading UK Bioscience can do for the Sustainable Bioeconomy.

I then enjoyed one of my periodic ‘University’ visits, this time to the University of Southampton, where as well as touring some impressive labs in a new (2010) interdisciplinary Life Sciences building, I enjoyed a range of very interesting presentations from some of our BBSRC grantholders. [...]