• 2013-2022close
• UK Research and Innovation close
• UKRI|EPSRC close
• 2010 close
• 2016 close

This project develops an approach, genomic selection, to increase the rate at which varieties of Spring barley are developed. This is a very important crop in national agriculture, particularly for the malting, brewing and distilling industries. It is important that the rate with which improved varieties are created is increased so that more effort can be placed by breeders on improving disease resistance while maintaining or increasing grain yield and grain quality, which remain of greatest importance to growers and end users.Genomic selection represents a way of predicting traits purely from genetic markers rather than by direct measurement. These predictions require that a set of plants is first measured for the target traits so that the effect of each marker can be estimated. However, after that, selection can occur for several generations purely on markers.Direct measurement of many traits can take much longer than a single growing season: seed must first be bulked up over several generations to provide a sufficient quantity for yield trials. In contrast, marker data can be collected within the generation time of any crop and is therefore much faster than conventional selection.Other approaches to plant breeding using genetic molecular markers have been in use for many years. In these, a very small numbers of markers with strong evidence of an affect on a trait are first identified. These are then tracked through the breeding programme. Genomic selection differs in that all available markers are used to predict traits: the more markers the better. The inclusion of all markers gives more accurate prediction of overall trait values even though the precise involvement of each marker is known with less certainty.Our study has four themes. Firstly, throughout the life of the project, we shall develop new statistical methods to establish relationships between very high numbers of genetic markers and traits. The methods we develop will be more focussed on the problems of plant breeding: most methods to date have been targeted at animal breeding. Secondly, we shall test methods which are available now using historical data available from to an existing Spring barley scheme. Results will be used immediately to make selections within this scheme. We expect to register new varieties from these selections within the five year life of the project.Next, we shall use results from the analysis of the historical data together with any early methodological developments we make to create crosses specifically to exploit genomic selection. These crosses may not necessarily be the typical crosses between two parents which are commonly used by breeders but may involve more complicated crossing schemes involving, for example four parents. Within the life of the project, we shall test whether this approach gives a greater response to selection that achieved by more conventional breeding, but there will be insufficient time to resister a new variety.Finally, we shall integrate results and methods from the first three phases to completely redesign the breeding programme to get the greatest advantage out of genomic selection.In short, we plan to develop a new approach to Spring barley breeding .Genomic selection could result in a fundamental change to the way crops are bred and enable targets for increased food production and environmental sustainability to be met. Compared to other temperate crops, Spring barley has a short generation time which make it well suited to develop and test these ideas, which may also be applicable to other crops.

Energy efficient processes are increasingly key priorities for ICT companies with attention being paid to both ecological and economic drivers. Although in some cases the use of ICT can be beneficial to the environment (for example by reducing journeys and introducing more efficient business processes), countries are becoming increasingly aware of the very large growth in energy consumption of telecommunications companies. For instance in 2007 BT consumed 0.7% of the UK's total electricity usage. In particular, the predicted future growth in the number of connected devices, and the internet bandwidth of an order of magnitude or two is not practical if it leads to a corresponding growth in energy consumption. Regulations may therefore come soon, particularly if Governments mandate moves towards carbon neutrality. Therefore the applicants believe that this proposal is of great importance in seeking to establish the current limits on ICT performance due to known environmental concerns and then develop new ICT techniques to provide enhanced performance. In particular they believe that substantial advances can be achieved through the innovative use of renewable sources and the development of new architectures, protocols, and algorithms operating on hardware which will itself allows significant reductions in energy consumption. This will represent a significant departure from accepted practices where ICT services are provided to meet the growing demand, without any regard for the energy consequences of relative location of supply and demand. In this project therefore, we propose innovatively to consider optimised dynamic placement of ICT services, taking account of varying energy costs at producer and consumer. Energy consumption in networks today is typically highly confined in switching and routing centres. Therefore in the project we will consider block transmission of data between centres chosen for optimum renewable energy supply as power transmission losses will often make the shipping of power to cities (data centres/switching nodes in cities) unattractive. Variable renewable sources such as solar and wind pose fresh challenges in ICT installations and network design, and hence this project will also look at innovative methods of flexible power consumption of block data routers to address this effect. We tackle the challenge along three axes: (i) We seek to design a new generation of ICT infrastructure architectures by addressing the optimisation problem of placing compute and communication resources between the producer and consumer, with the (time-varying) constraint of minimising energy costs. Here the architectures will leverage the new hardware becoming available to allow low energy operation. (ii) We seek to design new protocols and algorithms to enable communications systems to adapt their speed and power consumption according to both the user demand and energy availability. (iii) We build on recent advances in hardware which allow the block routing of data at greatly reduced energy levels over electronic techniques and determine hardware configurations (using on chip monitoring for the first time) to support these dynamic energy and communications needs. Here new network components will be developed, leveraging for example recent significant advances made on developing lower power routing hardware with routing power levels of approximately 1 mW/Gb/s for ns block switching times. In order to ensure success, different companies will engage their expertise: BT, Ericsson, Telecom New Zealand, Cisco and BBC will play a key role in supporting the development of the network architectures, provide experimental support and traffic traces, and aid standards development. Solarflare, Broadcom, Cisco and the BBC will support our protocol and intelligent traffic solutions. Avago, Broadcom and Oclaro will play a key role in the hardware development.

Miniaturisation has become a familiar aspect of modern technology: every year, laptops get thinner, mobile phones get smaller, and computers get faster as more and more components can be accommodated on their chips. The emergence of nanoscience as a scientific discipline has been driven by the relentless quest by the electronic device industry over the past four decades for ever-faster chips. The importance of miniaturisation is not just in the fact that smaller devices can be packed more closely together, however: when objects become very small indeed, they sometimes acquire entirely new properties that larger objects formed from the same materials do not normally exhibit. Catalysts have been used for over a century to accelerate chemical reactions, and many catalysts consist of metal particles supported on ceramics. For several decades, catalytic converters in car exhausts have used metallic nanoparticles - particles a few billionths of a metre in size - to clean the exhaust gas because the catalytic activity has been found to be dramatically increased by the small size of the active metal. When semiconductors are formed into structures of the same size, they acquire entirely new optical properties purely as a consequence of their small size - for example, they glow brightly when stimulated by electrical current, and the colour of the light emitted is determined by the size of the particle (and can thus be controlled with high precision). These phenomena are referred to as low-dimensional ones: they are new, unexpected phenomena that result only from the small size of the active objects.There is a very important sense in which biological objects may also be said to be low-dimensional. Cells are tiny objects that are driven by processes that involve small numbers of molecules. Biologists have recognised that single molecules are quite different from large groups of molecules, and there has therefore been a lot of interest in studying them, because they may help us to understand much better how larger systems work. However, there are no established tools for building systems of interacting single molecules, what might be called low-dimensional systems . New tools are required to achieve this, and the goal of this programme will be to develop them.We wish to build a synthetic low-dimensional system, which will incorporate biological molecules and synthetic models for them, that replicates the photosynthetic pathway of a bacterium. Photosynthesis is the basis for all life on earth, so it has fundamental importance. However, there are important other motivations for studying the marvellously efficient processes by which biological organisms collect sunlight and use it to live, grow and reproduce. The current concerns about shortage of fossil fuels, and the problems associated with the carbon dioxide produced by burning them, make solar energy a highly attractive solution to many pressing problems. To best exploit the huge amount of solar energy that falls on the earth, even in colder climates like the UK, we may do well to learn from Nature. By building a ship-based system that replicates the photosynthetic behaviour of a biological organism, we will gain new insights into how Natural photosynthesis works. More than that, however, we will develop entirely new, biologically-inspired design principles that may be useful in understanding many other scientific and engineering problems. At a fundamental level, biological systems work quite differently from electronic devices: they are driven by complex signals, they are fuzzy and probabilistic, where microsystems are based on binary logic and are precisely determined. The construction of a functioning low-dimensional system that replicates a cellular pathway will require the adoption, in a man-made structure, of these very different design principles. If we can achieve this it may yield important new insights into how similar principles could be applied to other technologies.

Light and the various ways it interacts with matter is our primary means of sensing the world around us. It is therefore no surprise that many technologies are based on light; for example submarine optical fibres make up the backbone of the Internet and display technology delivers affordable and compact crystal clear televisions. However, light itself has a limitation that we are still trying to overcome: light cannot be imaged or focused below half its wavelength, known as the diffraction limit . To see smaller objects we must use shorter wavelengths. e.g. Blue-ray, uses blue lasers (405 nm) to store more information than DVDs, which use longer wavelength red lasers (650 nm). Today, we are learning to overcome this limit by incorporating metals in optical devices. The proposed research investigates the use of metals to shatter the diffraction limit for creating new technological products, expand the capabilities of computers and the internet and deliver new sensor technologies for healthcare, defense and security.We often take for granted just how strongly light can interact with metals. Electricity, oscillating at 50 Hz (essentially very low frequency light), has a wavelength of thousands of kilometers, yet a wall-plug is no larger than a couple of inches; well below the diffraction limit! The relatively new capability to structure metal surfaces on the nanoscale now allows us to use this same phenomenon to beat the diffraction limit in the visible spectrum. Metals do this by storing energy on the electrons that collectively move in unison with light, called surface plasmons. This approach has recently re-invigorated the study of optics at the nano-scale, feeding the trend to smaller and more compact technologies.So what sets nano-optics aside from low frequency electricity if they share the same physics? I believe the paradigm of nano-optics is the capability to reduce the size of visible and infrared light so that it can occupy the same nano-scale volume as molecular, solid state and atomic electronic states for the first time. Under natural conditions the mismatch makes light-matter interactions inherently weak and slow. With nano-optics, interactions not only become stronger and faster but weak effects once difficult to detect are dramatically enhanced. This goal of this proposal is to strengthen such weak effects and utilize them to realize new capabilities in optics.With any new type of control come caveats. Firstly, it is difficult to focus light from its normal size beyond the diffraction limit. Secondly, having overcome the first challenge, light on metal surfaces is short lived due to a metal's resistance. My research plan is geared to directly address these challenges. The first thrust develops a concept that I recently proposed to mitigate the problem of energy loss to the point where surface plasmons become useful. Building on Silicon Photonics, a well-established commercial optical communications architecture, I can use established techniques to seamlessly transfer light between the realms of conventional and nano-optics with the potential for short term impact on photonics technology. The second thrust exploits my recent breakthrough on surface plasmon lasers, which can generate light directly on the nano-scale and sustain it indefinitely by laser action. This overcomes both challenges in nano-optics simultaneously. While conventional lasers transmit light over large distances, it is the light inside surface plasmon lasers that is unique. I want to use this light for spectroscopy at single molecule sensitivities. Just as ultra-fast lasers, serving as scientists' camera flash, have given us snap shots of Nature's fleeting processes, so surface plasmon lasers will allow us to probe Nature with unprecedented resolution and control at the scale of individual molecules. Exploring optics at untouched length scales is an exciting opportunity giving us the potential to make fundamentally new discoveries.

Many biological processes are based on chemical reactions. Viscosity determines how fast molecules can diffuse, and react. Therefore in cells viscosity can affect signalling, transport and drug delivery, and abnormal viscosity has been linked to disease and malfunction. In spite of its importance, measuring viscosity on a scale of a single cell is a challenge. Traditionally used mechanical methods are no longer applicable and must be substituted by a spectroscopic approach. Such spectroscopic approaches exist, e.g. single particle tracking, monitoring the rate of fluorescence recovery after photobleaching, or monitoring the rate of viscosity-dependent photochemical reactions. However all of the above are single point measurements and in a complex heterogeneous environment of a cell can not provide full information. The spectroscopic approach which allows imaging or mapping of viscosity would be of great benefit. This proposal aims to measure and map viscosity inside a single cell with high precision and high spatial resolution using novel fluorescent probes, called molecular rotors. In molecular rotors fluorescence competes with intramolecular rotation. In a viscous environment rotation is slowed down and this strongly affects fluorescence. Thus viscosity can be measured by detecting the change in either the fluorescence spectra or lifetimes. Existing technology allows imaging of either the fluorescent spectra or lifetimes with excellent spatial resolution in single live cells. To date we have produced maps of viscosity in certain parts of cells using this approach and demonstrated that local viscosity in those compartments can be up to 100x higher than that of water.Important advantage of molecular rotor approach is a very short measurement time. Using this advantage, this proposal aims to monitor how viscosity in a cell changes during dynamic biological processes, e.g. change in the membrane structure upon cell perturbation, drug administration and cell death.Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a form of cancer treatment, which relies on the generation of short-lived toxic agents within a cell upon irradiation of a drug. The efficacy of this treatment critically depends on the viscosity of the medium through which the cytotoxic agent must diffuse during its short life span. This proposal will monitor how cell viscosity and other vital biophysical cell parameters change during PDT. The novelty of our approach is in using spatially resolved irradiation of the drug within cells. E.g. we can irradiate a single organelle and monitor the change in the entire cell. Alternatively, we can irradiate the group of cells and monitor the behaviour of its neighbours. This approach is ideal tool to directly probe the 'bystander effect', when the cells which have not been directly treated show significant response to therapy, the effect which is very important in radiation and PDT cancer treatment. This proposal will be carried out in the Chemistry Department at Imperial College London where multidisciplinary collaborations are established to ensure the success of the work proposed. This project will address both the fundamental scientific issues in photochemistry and cell biology and also encourage the development of applications, such as measuring viscosity as a diagnostic tool and for monitoring the progress of treatments.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Despite the changing face of science, the importance of synthesis - the ability to make molecules - has not diminished. To solve the increasingly complex synthetic problems posed by Nature, medicine and materials, we must question the dogma that defines what we know about making organic molecules. This proposal seeks to address the 'synthesis grand challenge' to develop a new blueprint for chemical synthesis that will revolutionize the way that molecules are made in response to societies needs. In contrast to conventional synthesis, that often requires numerous chemical operations to link two molecules together, we will activate traditionally inert, but ubiquitous, carbon-hydrogen (C-H) chemical bonds with metal catalysts and transform them directly into a useful chemical architecture thereby streamlining the synthesis of natural products, medicines and materials. This will impact broadly in academia, industry and across modern society, providing (a) better ways of making molecules, (b) cheaper medicines through accelerated drug discovery, (c) advances in materials and chemical biology through chemical modification of polymers and proteins, (d) potential advances in energy related research through understanding the mechanism of hydrocarbon oxidation, and (e) an enhanced chemistry knowledge base.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

While scientific research was usually conducted in centuries past by loan, gentleman scientists,modern research is different. It needs people with different skills and different scientific trainingto come together with a common vision to solve a common problem.Think of a large task, like building a plane. It needs control engineers, material scientists,software engineers, fluid dynamicists, test pilots, to name but a few of the types of peoplewho might be involved. Ask yourself, how does a software engineer with a training in thedevelopment of programming languages, say, talk to a metallurgist or chemist in order tosolve the problems they encounter on a daily basis in the aeronautical industries?Of course, in industrial contexts one answer lies in training as the path to constructing a planeis largely known. But in science, there are no well-developed training programmes that allowpeople to come together to solve the big problems, we might not even know what people toput together in order to solve them. So, we need patience, lots of it, and trust but we also need funding and helpwith the process of getting ideas from one field to permeate into another.Often, as a mathematician, when I express my ideas to biologist colleagues, they first tell methat I am mad, that I must be wrong because there are experimental results from decadespast that contradict my thinking. However, over time, with enough coffee and patience we canexplore each others viewpoint and crystalise and then distill the idea down to its bare minimum. We thensee whether there really is something that mathematical thinking can bring to biology, or to physicsor chemistry.This can be a personal and painful process, but it is worthwhile in that the amalgam of two sets of ideaslead to new independent thinking and new ideas. However, this is not a route or an approach commonly funded by research councils. In this case EPSRC have been explicit in their desire for research themes that aimto bridge these gaps between disciplines and to really foster avenues of communication where few ornone currently exist. The funding associated with this award will be put to good use to create alively and relaxed research environment where we can express our mad ideas and see if they can beput to good use to solve important problems in a range of fields that spans physics, biology and mathematics.If the recent past is a guide to the near future, we expect this endeavour will lead to a number of new and important scientific insights.