Philippa Borrill

Major funding boost to bring world leading researchers to the John Innes Centre | John Innes Centre The John Innes Centre has been awarded an equal share of the new £54 million Global Talent Fund, to attract and support leading researchers and their teams to relocate to the UK. The new Global Talent...

Exciting times to be at @johninnescentre.bsky.social !

www.jic.ac.uk/press-releas...

Fantastic opportunity to start your independent career at the JIC here. Great startup package. Repost = nice. Thank you!!!

Fig. 1. (short legend see paper for full description): Null met1-1 mutants cannot be produced by crossing TILLING lines with disruptions in the three MET1-1 homoeologues. (A) Evolutionary relationships between MET1 homologues in Arabidopsis (AtMET1), rice (OsMET1a and OsMET1b), and wheat (homoeologue groups TaMET1-1, TaMET1-2, and TaMET1-3). (B) Crossing schematic showing the generation of the hexaploid MET1-1 populations: the C0465×C0884 population (top) and the C0451×C2028×C1292 population (bottom). (C) Structure of the three MET1-1 homoeologues. Filled rectangles represent exons, open rectangles represent untranslated regions, and lines represent introns. Triangles indicate the positions of the premature termination codon mutations in the TILLING lines used to produce the two hexaploid F2 populations (C0465×C0884, orange; C0451×C2028×C1292, purple). The green box signifies the Bromo adjacent homology domain (BAH) and the blue box signifies the C-5 cytosine methyltransferase domain.

🌾🧬 SPECIAL ISSUE RESEARCH 🌾🧬

📝 Varying gene dosage through mutating DNA methyltransferase 1-1 (MET1-1 ) in polyploid wheat generates quantitative changes to CG methylation without the lethal consequences observed in other crops - Burrows et al.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...
#PlantScience 🧪

Interesting read, thanks @dinglab.bsky.social!

Thanks to all authors @delfidorussen.bsky.social @emilieknight.bsky.social and @simmojsimmo.bsky.social and the many colleagues we've discussed this question with over the years!

In #wheat mutants we've long wondered if the expression of homoeologs is upregulated to compensate. Could that explain homoeolog redundancy?

Spoiler alert: no! Great summary by lead author @delfidorussen.bsky.social ⬇️ and the whole preprint is here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#plantscience

I enjoyed your piece! Not sure I'll take up work on Ceratopteris yet.... I'll stick to wheat for now 😀

Wonderful to see such a range of plant model organisms featured in @cp-devcell.bsky.social. From crops like wheat and maize all the way through to liverworts, algae & ferns!🌾🌿🌽🥬🦠

Many opinions including why I propose using wheat as a model to investigate polyploidy: doi.org/10.1016/j.de...

It's an honour to be shortlisted for the Falling Walls Foundation Science Breakthrough of the Year 2025 for our work on epigenetics in crop breeding. I'm excited to see where this work leads us!

Here we describe our first steps into epigenetic mutants in wheat doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

EVENT - “Fundamental Biology of Legume Crops” Workshop

Discuss the latest research in genomics, metabolomics, biotic interactions and plant development.

💻 Application deadline: 16 July 2025

🗓️ 3 - 4 November 2025
📍The John Innes Centre, NR4 7UH

Find out more and apply: okt.to/fgZCWB

Thanks for sharing Lisa. It's always interesting to see how projects deviate over time from the original idea, and great that your 'failed' experiment has been so impactful!

Thank you to all co-authors for a great collaboration @glombikm.bsky.social Ramesh Arunkumar, Sam Burrows, Sophie Mogg and Xiaoming Wang!

Our latest work found that homoeolog expression bias is inherited for ~26% of triads in wheat. Intriguingly we found that new patterns of homoeolog expression bias are more frequent when one of the parents is a landrace.
Read more in Genome Biology: rdcu.be/eokf2
@johninnescentre.bsky.social

Looking for the direct target genes of a transcription factor in #wheat? Our protocol uses protoplasts, skipping transgenic plants to save months!

Great step by step protocol @emilieknight.bsky.social! Read more below ⬇️ Thanks to all contributors!
#plantscience @johninnescentre.bsky.social

Congratulations @andytruman4.bsky.social and team! 🎉 Very interesting to see the work go from genetic prediction all the way to ecological role.

It was a pleasure to host @ismaelgf.bsky.social for 3 months @johninnescentre.bsky.social. Looking forward to continuing our collaboration with @irnasa.bsky.social on transcriptomic responses to water deficit in wheat 💦🍞🌾

A picture showing the attendees of the Monogram2025 conference in Aberystwyth.

A picture of Dr Aiswarya Girija (Ash) receiving a thank you for her work coordinating the organisation if Monogram2025.

A picture showing the people who helped organise Monogram2025.

A picture revealing that Monogram2026 will be hosted by the NIAB institute in Cambridge.

#Monogram2025 has finished. It was a fantastic conference with outstanding speakers and great interactions. I am very grateful to the organisers for their hard work!! (Especially Ash!)

Looking forward to next year's conference hosted by NIAB.
@monogram-uk.bsky.social
@niab-uk.bsky.social

Totally agree, what a great conference and well organised by the @ibers.bsky.social team.

Congratulations to Isabel Faci @johninnescentre.bsky.social winner of the #Monogram2025 ECR excellence award! Fascinating talk on how decoupling environmental signals can induce aerial branching in wheat!

Congratulations to @katielong.bsky.social @johninnescentre.bsky.social winner of the #Monogram2025 ECR excellence award! Fabulous talk on the intricate patterns of gene expression in wheat spikes!

Wonderful talk from @delfidorussen.bsky.social at #Monogram2025 about DNA methylation mutants in wheat. You can read the full MET1-1 mutant characterisation which was just published this week @jxbotany.bsky.social ⬇️

Really enjoying #Monogram2025 so far @ibers.bsky.social Great talk by @chen-ji.bsky.social on her latest work exploring gene expression patterns in wheat grains. So many interesting genes to characterise!

Partial redundancy buffers deleterious effects of mutating DNA methyltransferase 1-1 (MET1-1) in polyploid wheat Varying gene dosage through mutating DNA methyltransferase 1-1 (MET1-1 ) in polyploid wheat generates quantitative changes to CG methylation without the le

I’m very happy to share the published version of our paper on the role of MET1 in wheat 🌾 🧬

It’s been really exciting to discover more about DNA methylation in wheat and it’s huge polyploid genome

doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

Looking forward to #Monogram2025 next week. Check out the programme below ⬇️ @monogram-uk.bsky.social

Group photo of Borrill lab team with 4 bluesky account holders indicated by bluesky butterfly icon.

Starting to build our lab's interactions on bluesky. It appears we've got a positional effect from the summer lab photo 😂... @delfidorussen.bsky.social @chen-ji.bsky.social @beccatesta.bsky.social ... but not for alumnus @glombikm.bsky.social (top left of photo) @johninnescentre.bsky.social

@surbhigrewal.bsky.social Welcome to bluesky! Congrats on the paper but please can you check the link? It didn't work for me. Would be interested to read it!

Come hear Chen Ji talk about her fascinating results from spatial transcriptomics in wheat. There will be lots of beautiful images of gene expression patterns!
🗓️18-19 June in Norwich, UK
Registration is open ⬇️

Congratulations @delfidorussen.bsky.social on being awarded the #IWGSC -Feuillet Early Career award to present your work on #wheat homoeolog transcriptional compensation at PAG.🌾 #ProudPI.