Dr Alexander Darlington from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick has received one of sixteen fellowships in the 20th cohort of Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowships. His research focusses on engineering and biotechnology and addresses key challenges to the industrialisation of engineered microbes.

The research he will embark upon includes designing new genetic control systems which dynamically balance growth with engineered function to maintain good performance over real-world timescales. Working with industrial partners he is applying these methods to the biomanufacture of high value chemicals, allowing everyday chemicals to be produced from agricultural waste products instead of petrochemical feedstocks.

Professor Jose Gutierrez-Marcos and an international team of researchers have uncovered the mechanism that allows plants to pass on their ‘memories’ to offspring, which results in growth and developmental defects.

Press Release (1 December 2020)

101 seed samples from 18 different types of crop species including onions, carrots and cauliflower are to be deposited at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Arctic Norway on the 31st October 2018, from the UK Vegetable Genebank (UKVGB) at the University of Warwick.
 
Press Release

A research team led by Dr Robin Allaby of the School of Life Sciences has found evidence of wheat reaching Britain 2000 years before the arrival of farming in the UK.
This has a significant impact on our understanding of Britain in pre-Neolithic times, indicating that the ancient British were not cut off from mainland Europeans on an isolated island 8,000 years ago as previously thought with the most plausible explanation for the wheat reaching the site being the existence of social and trade networks. It is thought that these networks might have been assisted by land bridges that connected the south east coast of Britain to the European mainland, facilitating exchanges between hunters in Britain and farmers in southern Europe.

Evidence for a variety of wheat known as Einkorn was found from sedimentary DNA at a submerged archaeological site off the south coast of England (picture above by Roland Brookes, The Maritime Archaeology Trust).

The research work was completed in collaboration with co-leads Professor Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford and Professor Mark Pallen of Warwick Medical School, the Maritime Archaeology Trust, the University of Birmingham and the University of St. Andrews.

This research has been published in the academic journal Science, February 2015
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