The James Hutton Institute joins £35 million investment to boost crop resilience
The James Hutton Institute is proud to be a partner in PhenomUK, a major new £35 million, six-year research infrastructure funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund and led by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), to accelerate the development of resilient crops and strengthen long-term food security.
PhenomUK will deliver a co-ordinated, nationwide phenotyping infrastructure tracking crops from controlled environments to field conditions.
Phenomics is the science of the measurement and analysis of an organism’s traits – its characteristics – in order to understand how genes and environment influence plant growth and development.
Using advanced imaging and automation, the programme will enable rapid testing of crop performance under stresses such as drought, heat and elevated CO₂, helping speed up breeding, innovation and the transition from research to real-world agriculture.
The Hutton’s contribution centres on the Advanced Plant Growth Centre (APGC), which includes facilities for molecular analysis, high-throughput phenotyping, vertical growth, post-harvest storage and controlled environments to simulate current and future climates.
Its deputy director, Dr Rob Hancock, said, “PhenomUK represents a fantastic opportunity to integrate and expand UK phenotyping infrastructure. Through the development of shared approaches and methodologies, the network will significantly alleviate the phenotyping bottleneck, which has been caused by the rapid development of genetic analysis techniques as well as the size of crop populations, and which threatens to restrict developments in crop breeding.
This new structure should accelerate the time to producing new cultivars which are required to mitigate increasing environmental challenges in crop production.
Dr Rob Hancock – Deputy Director of the Advanced Plant Growth Centre (APGC)
By integrating controlled environments with field platforms, PhenomUK will deliver a “seed-to-field” pipeline for crop evaluation. Its national framework for data, access and collaboration will reduce duplication and accelerate innovation across academia and industry.
At a time of increased climate and resource pressures on UK agriculture, the project will support more precise crop development, strengthen food security and advance sustainable, resilient farming systems.
The APGC is part of a £62 million investment through the Tay Cities Region Deal (TCRD), a partnership between local, Scottish and UK governments and the private, academic and voluntary sectors and aims to revolutionise crop production systems to produce food with less environmental impact through state-of-the-art research and innovation infrastructure associated with precision and controlled-environment agriculture.
