Last week encompassed a wide spectrum of activities, starting with one of the triannual meetings of our Audit Board. This very important Board reports to Council, and is responsible for monitoring our standards of risk management, corporate governance, internal control and financial propriety.

I then managed to attend the second half of a meeting organised in collaboration with the Food Standards Agency and the Health Protection Agency, looking at the potential impact of ‘next generation sequencing’ and related methods on the ability to detect and type potentially pathogenic strains of microbe that might be isolated from food or other matrices. Not least since the recent German E. coli outbreak, it has become pretty obvious that the most sensible – and nowadays most economic – approach to typing an organism is indeed to sequence its genome, since as well as providing a definitive typing, such data provide important information of use in epidemiology (and, by the detection of antibiotic-resistance genes, potentially in treatment). Significant investment, especially in the skills and the necessary informatics, will be necessary to realise this properly, however. [...]

Most of last week was taken up with a tour of some of the Scottish Universities. I started at the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh, where we had a hard-hat trip around the large and impressive new building being constructed as part of the Easter Bush Research Centre.

The next visit occupied nearly a full day at the Institute of Aquaculture (IoA) at the University of Stirling, where we saw a very wide range of facilities and projects including fundamental molecular genetics and genomics, breeding, nutrition, disease mechanisms and treatment, welfare and sustainability, applied to a wide variety of fish and shellfish species. Worldwide, aquaculture continues to grow significantly, since the nutritional benefits of eating fish are well known, and the correct species farmed effectively can be excellent and productive sources of high quality protein. A number of authors from the IoA contributed to one of the Open Access papers recently published in the Phil Trans special issue on Global Food Security. It is probably fair to say that general oversight of the prospects for agriculture focuses mainly on land-based crops and livestock, whereas – as an island nation if for no other reason – I do consider that we should be giving greater thought to increasing the role of aquaculture. The scientific opportunities are certainly very great. [...]

This week was topped and tailed by University visits, the first being to the University of Exeter, who under the very able leadership of Vice Chancellor Steve Smith (who left Aber in 2002 at the same time as I did) and more proximately in Biology of Nick Talbot have grown their biosciences substantially and with great effect. Among the very interesting presentations were ones by Gero Steinberg, who (with his mathematical collaborator Peter Ashwin) has been developing and testing systems biology models (in a model organism, Ustilago maydis) of cytoskeleton-based trafficking that have completely changed their view of this. This was not an area I knew at all well, so it was illuminating to see this exciting combination of state-of-the-art cell imaging and numerical modelling. Murray Grant described a number of very interesting studies of plant defence, including new insights into the role of plant hormones, an improved knowledge of which aid considerably our work in Food Security, while John Love highlighted a programme co-funded by Shell in the area of third-generation biofuel production and Steve Bates, one of our New Investigator grantholders, described yeast cell cycle proteins that might make novel drug targets. [...]