Norwich, United Kingdom
January 14, 2025
Senior representatives from CIMMYT visited the John Innes Centre on 6th January 2025 to discuss current and future collaboration opportunities.
CIMMYT is a cutting edge, non-profit, international organization dedicated to fostering improved quantity, quality, and dependability of production systems and basic cereals such as maize, wheat, triticale, sorghum, millets, and associated crops. They do this through applied agricultural science, particularly in the Global South, often through building strong partnerships.
The John Innes Centre and CIMMYT have a formal strategic collaboration together to enable joint research, knowledge sharing, and communications to further the global effort to develop the future of wheat.
Professor Graham Moore, director of the John Innes Centre, said: “We were pleased to welcome colleagues from CIMMYT to our centre, and to show them the incredible work our teams are doing to protect and develop crops fit for the future. It was also great to be able to take them to our experimental field station.
“Through their international reach, our partnership with CIMMYT can help ensure our solutions are implemented on a large scale, and that our science is solving agriculture’s biggest challenges.”
Collaborative projects include the cutting-edge Wheat Disease Early Warning Advisory System (DEWAS) project, made up of six interconnected work packages, focusing on preventing outbreaks from novel wheat pathogen strains across the world. Professor Diane Saunders, group leader at the John Innes Centre, is the lead of the DEWAS Pathogen Diagnostics work package.
Professor Paul Nicholson, group leader at the John Innes Centre, is also working with CIMMYT to identify genes that confer resistance to the highly destructive fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae which causes wheat blast.
CIMMYT’s Director General, Dr Bram Govaerts, said: “We want to make sure our research is aligned to what the world needs for the future. Historically we have enjoyed a long partnership with JIC, as one of our key scientific partners, especially in wheat. This will continue, with around 70% of wheat grown across the world coming through the CIMMYT network. We are keen to continue to work together to show the impact our organisations have already made, and to show farmers across the world how they have already benefitted from our research and support.”
“Building on CIMMYT’s long-standing partnership with JIC, we are excited to leverage our joint capabilities in wheat and beyond to ensure that the farmers of the world have opportunity to build resilience and achieve much-needed yield and nutrition gains sustainably,” said Dr Sarah Hearne, CIMMYT’s new Chief Science and Innovation Officer whose early career involved some time at the John Innes Centre itself.
Topics
Species
