Professor Hugh Nimmo and colleagues in the Institute of Biomedical & Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow have been awarded funding of some £3.5M to create a centre of excellence for plant cell signalling and metabolic regulation with the aim of understanding how plants respond to different kinds of environmental stress.

The award , under the 4th round of the Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF), which has been established to enhance and modernise the research infrastructure of UK universities, will be administered by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to provide the modified accommodation and the scientific equipment required.

Building on existing strengths within the University's Plant Molecular Science Group across a range of complementary disciplines including biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics, the research will investigate connections between the structure and functions of plant proteins in order to understand how plants copes with changes in the environment.

Water limitation, for example, is an obvious problem in the world's arid environments and associated irrigation leads to a build-up of salt levels in soil. Understanding factors that contribute to plant water usage will be crucial to improving crop yields in the face of increasing pressure on water resources and to bringing marginal lands into arable production. Other environmental stresses to be investigated include increased ultraviolet radiation and exposure to viruses.

The ultimate aim of the research is to improve the understanding of how plants respond to environmental signals in order to breed new plant varieties capable of withstanding such environmental changes.

To this end, the award will enable the application of new techniques for analysing proteins and state of the art high resolution imaging. It will provide a post-genomic approach to understanding key aspects of plant growth and development.

For further information contact:

Prof Hugh Nimmo, Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow

tel 0141 330 4721 email h.nimmo@bio.gla.ac.uk

or the University Press Office 0141 330 3535

JIF is a competitive initiative funded by the Department of Trade and Industry, the Wellcome Trust and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. For further information contact:

DTI Press Office: 020-7215 2345 (Out of Hours : 0207 215 3234/ 3505)

For further information, on BBSRC involvement contact:

Dr Monica Winstanley, Head, BBSRC Public Affairs Branch

Tel 01793 413204 email public.affairs@bbsrc.ac.uk

Media Relations Office (media@gla.ac.uk)

First published: 18 December 2000