New Crop Science Centre opens in Cambridge

Food security is the defining agenda for our growing global population. Uncertainties associated with a changing climate and instabilities in markets for food and fuel will require significant advances in crop production to allow crops and soils to be sustainably exploited to meet these demands. For this to happen we need to bridge the gap between basic and applied crop science and bring together scientific, academic and commercial research centres and organisations to improve crop production.

The University of Cambridge and NIAB have taken one of the first steps in this process with the establishment of the Crop Science Centre; a coalition of expertise between NIAB and the University’s Department of Plant Sciences (DPS). The centre will provide leadership in crop science, generating a dynamic research community whilst training a new generation of researchers in crop science.

The Crop Science Centre combines skills and develops expertise from all the organisations, including cutting-edge and fundamental plant science research underpinning yield enhancement, crop pre-breeding, and the translation of basic research into sustainable agriculture and extension services. This will involve bringing together a range of disciplines and departments from the University to work alongside NIAB’s agronomic and breeding expertise, at the new research centre and laboratories, based at NIAB’s Lawrence Weaver Road site in Cambridge.

The new Centre benefits from the diverse skills and expertise of the University and NIAB, providing an environment for research excellence in crops, with the drive and expertise for scientific translation to address real-world problems. The pillars of excellence within the Centre are crop nutrition, plant interactions with pests and pathogens and the enhancement of photosynthesis –  the new Centre will bring a range of disciplines to these research areas to recognise impact in agriculture.

To learn more about the new Crop Science Centre, please visit: https://www.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/research/crop-science

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