Global Challenges Research Funds awarded to collaborative project September 3, 2018 Geoff Barton Three new funding awards from the Global Challenges Research Fund were recently made to research teams in the Division of Plant Sciences. One of those projects was for a collaborative project between Plant Sciences, GRE and the James Hutton Institute. Gordon Simpson Gordon Simpson and Geoff Barton were awarded £180k for a project designed to transform the annotation of neglected crop genomes. The funding focuses on using the recently developed Oxford nanopore direct RNA sequencing technology that Gordon and Geoff’s teams have been working with over the past year. The team comprises Glenn Bryan and Runxuan Zhang of the James Hutton Institute, and external collaborators in Malaysia and India. In addition, the team will function as a node within the African Orphan Crops Consortium, to test the utility of nanopore RNA sequencing in revealing what the genomes of neglected crops really encode.
