Welcome back to all from the winter break, to the first blog of 2012!

As last year, I attended part of the Oxford Farming Conference, where I enjoyed many excellent talks, such as one from USDA Chief Economist Joe Glauber highlighting the economic benefits to be had from investment in agricultural R&D and another from the newly knighted Defra Chief Scientist Sir Bob Watson. In informal conversation I also discovered the existence (from a young OFC Scholar) of the Miscanthus Growers Group. There is no doubt that improved and sustainable agricultural productivity is very much back on the scientific and agricultural agenda.
Continue reading: Oxford Farming, synthetic biology and our hi-tech future

Last week involved two external visits. The first and short one was to Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) on the Oxford Science Park. ONT has a very exciting core technology, based on the work of Hagan Bayley at Oxford University, for sequencing DNA by studying the electrical changes accompanying the passage of DNA bases through a nm-sized (mainly, but not exclusively, biologically based) hole (a nanopore). DNA Sequencing is a highly competitive area, but one advantage of this particularly technology is that it can be (and has been) applied to a variety of other assays.
Continue reading: Oxford Nanopore Technology and IBERS

Last week began with a visit of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Dr Vince Cable, to open the Norwich Innovation Centre on the Norwich Research Park. Dr Cable was also shown round The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), where the full array of modern genome sequencing instrumentation was on show, together with some of the tools for analysing genomics data. The point was made that if automobiles had increased in speed at the rate that genome sequencing had over the last 10 years they would now be travelling at millions of miles per hour…
Continue reading: Innovation centres, the wider scientific community and E. coli outbreaks

It is very much not news that food security has come high up the scientific and social agenda (with the Russian wheat harvest, and wheat prices more generally, in the news – and one can listen also to Sir John Beddington on the Today programme last week), that we continue to pump fossil-fuel-derived CO2 into the atmosphere at our peril, that our source of bioenergy and chemicals in the not-too-distant future is going to have to be that very CO2 itself as fixed by photosynthesis, and that BBSRC is ready to lead the scientific response to these challenges.
Continue reading: Foresight, Food and Farming Futures – 65,535

Last week, I enjoyed reading a couple of books on what is known as complexity or complex systems, the first by Melanie Mitchell and the second by Stuart Kauffman. The concept of complexity has a very particular kind of meaning in systems science, and though definitions abound, Mitchell’s version captures the essence: a complex system is “a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behaviour, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation by learning or evolution” (although I’d quibble with the necessity for large networks).
Continue reading: Complexity, networks and reductionism