Xingdong Bian

Connecting academia and the wheat industry to resolve the critical challenge of hybrid wheat and shape the future of crop research.

When we speak of food security, we often associate that with staple crops such as wheat, rice and maize. But there’s another side to the picture - one that has been largely neglected. For hundreds of millions of people, ‘orphan crops’ are a vital resource, and one that Earlham Institute’s Dr Jose De Vega and Dr Janet Higgins have been working hard to improve.

How can food security be improved? That’s one of the major challenges facing science and society. To feed and nourish a rapidly expanding population, crop yields must increase in the face of the threats posed by climate change and once fertile areas of land must be reinvigorated. However we manage it, it’s vital we protect and enhance the biodiversity on which much of our agricultural system relies.

Integral to the international effort that brought us the bread wheat genome, decoding this complex, hexaploid crop - from sequence to assembly, annotation and even mapping the epigenome - has been at the heart of what we do at Earlham Institute.

Plants and us - we’re not so different, especially when it comes to the daily rituals of life - and circadian clocks show we’re all creatures of habit.

How has research at the Earlham Institute impacted on global food security over the last ten years, and what is the value to the global economy in the future?