News

Once dismissed as ‘junk DNA’ that served no purpose, a family of ‘jumping genes’ found in tomatoes has the potential to accelerate crop breeding for traits such as improved drought resistance. Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Sainsbury Laboratory (SLCU) and Department of Plant Sciences have discovered that drought stress triggers the …

A new, free online course aimed at 16-19 year olds across Europe, funded by EIT Food and developed by the Gatsby Plant Science Education Programme (GPSEP) at the University of Cambridge alongside international partners, aims to inspire young people to study science so they can help to create food of the future.We know the world’s population is grow…

Congrats! You have found me and the orchid!Yesterday morning, Henry Lodeur was arrested at his home just outside of Grasse, France. He is accused of kidnapping the English professor Mark Jannick, who was reported to have boarded a plane together with Lodeur at the Lisbon airport for Maputo, Mozambique, before reappearing last week in torn clothing …

New research from James Locke's group shows that clocks in plant seedlings can self-organise without a master. From cyanobacteria to humans, nearly all living things on Earth have an internal circadian clock that regulates their activities on a 24-hour cycle. For mammals, there is a master clock located in the brain that controls peripheral clocks …

An interdisciplinary research collaboration between SLCU and the University of Oxford has engineered a novel synthetic plant-microbe signalling pathway that could provide the foundation for transferring nitrogen fixation to cereals.Published in Nature Communications today, the team of plant scientists, microbiologists and chemists used synthetic bi…

The University of Cambridge has elected Giles Oldroyd to the Russel R Geiger Professorship of Crop Science, leading the Cambridge Centre for Crop Science (3CS), which is a partnership between the University of Cambridge and NIAB.As Director of 3CS Professor Oldroyd will be based in the Crop Science Building at NIAB’s new headquarters on Lawrence We…

Scientists at Sainsbury Laboratory have uncovered striking similarities in how two distantly related plants defend against pathogens despite splitting from their common ancestor more than 400 million years ago. Our current understanding on how plants successfully defend against disease-causing pathogens mainly originates from studying economically …

Dr Sarah Robinson has joined the SLCU research leadership team and will head a new research group focused on investigating the mechanical properties of plants associated with growth.Dr Robinson, who has been appointed as a Career Development Fellow, brings with her an interdisciplinary approach incorporating biomechanics, modelling and genomics to …

Plant scientists at SLCU and the University of Bordeaux have discovered a gene that they hope can be used to widen a nutrient trafficking bottleneck and potentially increase crop yields.Plant scientists around the world are working on a number of different strategies to sustainably increase crop yields. Increasing the efficiency of how plants trans…

The Schornack team has discovered that increasing the activity of a single gene can increase a plant’s resistance to blight at its first line of defence — the epidermis.In the 1840s, a mysterious single-celled organism devastated Ireland's potato crops, contributing to a catastrophe, the 'Great Hunger', in which millions of people died or were forc…

SLCU is delighted to welcome Dr François Nédélec to the join its research leadership team.Dr Nédélec brings with him a wealth of knowledge and experience in cell and developmental biology with a multidisciplinary background in mathematics, physics and biology combining theoretical and experimental investigations to exploring cell biology dynamics.H…

New insights into how buds communicate with each other through the dynamic auxin transport network have been published by SLCU plant scientists. Most gardeners know that to encourage a bushy plant they need to prune off the top leading shoot. Decapitating the plant by removing the dominant apical shoot apex helps the many dormant lateral (axillary)…

Alex Jenkin, project manager at the Gatsby Plant Science Education Programme (GPSEP), a team administered by the Sainsbury Laboratory, has been selected to join an international group of 95 women in science on a three-week expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula. Photo by Nataliia Kuksa.The expedition, departing from Ushuaia, Argentina, in November i…

As parents of identical twins will tell you, they are never actually identical, even though they have the same genes. This is also true in the plant world. Now, new research by Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University (SLCU) is helping to explain why ‘twin’ plants, with identical genes, grown in identical environments continue to display unique ch…

Plant science researchers from SLCU and the University of Helsinki have identified key regulatory networks controlling how plants grow ‘outwards’, which could help us to grow trees to be more efficient carbon sinks and increase vegetable crop yields. As we crane our necks to stare up in awe at the height of the world’s tallest trees, it’s easy to f…