Strategic Programmes

Our research faculty includes researchers with expertise in human, vertebrate, plant, and microbial genomics, who work together with computational and systems biology experts to deliver comprehensive and integrated analyses for traits of interest in economically important species. We are linking genome plasticity to gene regulatory variation, and regulatory network changes to phenotypic variation between strains, populations and species.

Through our multidisciplinary expertise, we are developing novel genome assembly and variant calling algorithms, improved gene annotation, and reconstruction and analysis of molecular networks to enable and transform research across food and health.

We are in the unique position to transfer the know-how from human and vertebrate systems directly to more complex species, such as crops, allowing us to make technological and analytical advances with international impact.

Our research is uniquely enabled by four National Capabilities, each delivering key support and infrastructure underpinning our scientific research. Our National Capabilities empower us to process, store, interpret and integrate data from computational analyses and support our proposed data-intensive research that embraces and confronts modern scientific challenges surrounding data scale and complexity.

The Earlham Institute's Core Strategic Programme (CSP) “Genomics to Food Security” translates achievements in decoding plant, microbial and non-animal genomes to help our understanding of complex traits in crops, aquatic species and microbes.

Our CSP is divided in to three complimentary work packages focusing on delivering computational methods for the study of complex genomes, the analysis of the impact of diversity on traits and phenotypes in species important for food security, and developing and implementing data standards and infrastructure for FAIR research data management.

Overall Strategic Programme

Analysing and Interpreting Genomes important in food security

Systems Genomics approaches to understand complex phenotypes

Data science for integrative biology

Addressing the grand challenge of providing a growing human population with adequate and nutritious food, against a background of changing global climatic conditions, requires the mobilisation of national and international wheat expertise.

The Designing Future Wheat programme coordinates expertise across BBSRC institutes with complementary university programmes across four linked themes to make sure researchers are well equipped to support the development of this crucial food crop. We are responsible for the improved data access and analysis theme, led by Rob Davey.

We will generate the underpinning data and subsequently develop the tools and resources, to form the UK national node of the global Wheat Information System, in order to bridge the gaps in current applications. Enabling computational analysis and interrogation for breeders and biologists, alongside the capture, curation and integration of reference data, will promote a ‘genomic supermarket’ to federate the wheat datasets required for large scale complex comparative analyses, and the dissemination of these data back to the research community.