Johnathan Napier

Come and learn more about plant biotechnology, GM and nutritional enhancement at @rothamsted.ac.uk stand at New Scientist Live in London this weekend. And you can write your name with my DsRed letters (made from GM camelina seeds)!

RIP William Orbit. Your music has been part of my life for over 35 years. Thanks for all the fascinating rhythms.

I just published this short article about making omega-3 PUFAs in transgenic plants, with the aim of putting a spotlight on some unanswered questions. I also flag the issue of transgene silencing in plant biotech as a problem that hasn't gone away! nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Great to be drilling our GM camelina again, to determine the real-world resilience of our nutritional enhancement traits. This is the 13th consecutive year we have run GM camelina trials at @rothamsted.bsky.social, we like long term experiments!

We're happy to announce that PBJ is now part of India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative 🥳 Eligible researchers can now publish with all their APC costs covered by the scheme - a major step toward expanding equitable access to scientific publishing! #openaccess #plantscience

Mutations in Components of the TREX-2 Complex Result in Misexpression of the Kelch-Domain F-Box Protein KFB39 Promoter in Arabidopsis thaliana (Michaela C. Matthes, Smita Kurup, John A. Pickett, Johnathan A. Napier) doi.org/10.1002/pld3... #PlantScience @aspbofficial @wileyecology @sebiology

It's 30 years to the day since the first GM crop product went on sale in the UK. To celebrate this milestone, here's a pic of my original tin with our new GM tomatoes engineered to accumulate omega-3 fish oils in the fruit. In collaboration with @johninnescentre.bsky.social & Susana Silvestre.

Great to be here in London as part of the BBSRC 'Accelerating impact in diet & health' impact showcase. We will be talking about the omega-3 tomatoes we have developed in collaboration with colleagues at @johninnescentre.bsky.social

www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1bd9fd0... Some seasonally-relevant content, highlighting the nutritional value of smoked salmon. Our contributions on improving the omega-3s & astaxanthin are mentioned, along with expert input from Uni of Stirling & others. Merry Xmas (and eat more salmon)!

Partnering with @royalholloway.bsky.social & @uniofreading.bsky.social for a @news.ukri.org BBSRC-funded Doctoral Focal Award training the next generation of Engineering Biologists. It builds on crop engineering biology for real-world impact. @freddietheodoulou.bsky.social #PhD #DoctoralTraining

👏to Dr Susana Silvestre winning Best Poster at the Lipids in Diet & Health conference about her work unravelling how our GM camelina can efficiently accumulate important omega-3s. Great to see so much interest in our novel sustainable sources of these fatty acids!

us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regist… Please register to join this webinar on the 24th Nov to hear about research recently published in Plant Biotechnology Journal by Ed Cahoon and colleagues at UNL.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A surprising diversion for me - something that isn't about omega-3s. But an interesting and genuinely puzzling excursion into Arabidopsis forward genetics and promoter-reporter gene regulation. Credit to Michaela Matthes for driving this project.

On behalf of Plant Biotechnology Journal, very happy to support this meeting. I attended Plastid Preview meetings as an ECR (quite some time ago!) and they are vibrant and productive events.

Great to see our collaborative study with Ed Cahoon and colleagues on the front cover of PBJ, describing our successful efforts to engineer the accumulation of astaxanthin in GM camelina seeds. Astaxanthin is a ketocarotenoid that is a powerful antioxidant & used in aquaculture feeds as a pigment.

In a great collaboration led by Ed Cahoon at UNL we engineered Camelina to make the pigment astaxanthin. We used genes from the Adonis plant - picture below gives a clue why! Successfully field trialled in UK & USA. Helping to make aquaculure more sustainable. www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/camelin...

It was a pleasure to be part of the team that delivered this study, led by colleagues at Malaga (and including Noemi Ruiz Lopez who used to work on our omega-3 project). @rothamsted.bsky.social contributed with our world-class lipidomics capability, delivered by @lvm.bsky.social and Richard Haslam.

In addition to our big 4000m2 GM camelina trial at Suffolk, last week we also sowed some smaller plots on the @rothamsted.bsky.social Farm in Harpenden. This trial has a range of traits & combines GE with GM approaches. Nice pics by Lihua Han of the ISPG GM field trial team & site. Blue skies too!

Another GM camelina field trial successfully drilled this Saturday, under the azure skies of Suffolk. The @rothamsted.bsky.social Farm team of Mark, Samuil & Lewis did a great job in the hot & dusty conditions, but that's what testing in the real world is like. Thx also to Lihua Han for pix.

Important and impactful data from a joint study using our GM camelina oil. Great collaboration with University of Stirling, BioMar & NTNU in Norway. Our novel oil really works as a sustainable replacement for fish oil - exciting to see this confirmed again! www.fishfarmingexpert.com/fish-welfare...

Very happy to have contributed to this article. It's a topic I am very passionate about. We need to see significantly more translational and impact from all the investments in fundamental research. It is weird that many primary publications claim a big breakthrough, and then, nothing more happens!

Thank you to @johnathan-n.bsky.social from @rothamsted.bsky.social for visiting @ljmuofficial.bsky.social today. His talk on #plant #biotechnology showed how to tackle a global problem and develop a solution. Now there are plants producing beneficial oils for the benefit of society

Here's an update on our camelina transformation pipeline. Because we use a visual marker (DsRed) we can chip the primary transgenic seeds for non-destructive analyses. Compare that with other systems that require extended tissue culture stages, and camelina is a clear winner!

This should be an exciting session, exploring multiple aspects of translational and predictive biology. @meganlmatthews.bsky.social is the lead organiser and I am happy to provide additional support. Also pleased to acknowledge the support of PBJ for this session. See you all in Antwerp!

Rothamsted welcomes latest advance of UK Government Precision Breeding Legislation. "This Act will make life much easier for creators and developers working with precision bred - specifically gene edited - crops" @johnathan-n.bsky.social Full story: www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/rothams...

Here at @rothamsted.bsky.social we are fortunate to have a very large area of GM glasshouse. Here we are growing up enough plants to transform 18 different constructs, optimising the accumulation of EPA&DHA omega-3 fish oils. Camelina is the ideal crop for such an iterative approach.

www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/rothams... Great that so many @rothamsted.bsky.social people contributed to making this event a success, interacting with MPs & policy makers. Also almost certainly the first time anyone has brought gene edited seeds in the House of Commons!

I don't get into the lab much (to the immense relief of everyone else!) but this afternoon I was screening some of our high Omega-3 lines for the presence of the DsRed marker - this event is homozygous & stable, making lots of EPA after growing in the field last year. That's a success!!

Happy Holidays! Here's a rather unseasonal pic from the garden today. I always associated Primulas with Easter, but climate change has altered all that (and not in a good way).

Just because it is the festive season doesn't mean we stop our experiments - lots of GM and GE camelina plants growing in our glasshouses. Happy Holidays!

An investigation by SSA into a recent UK Govt report charting further declines in farmland bird numbers in Britain raises serious questions about the scientific basis on which these statistics are collected and interpreted. Find out more 👇 www.scienceforsustainableagriculture.com/buttonpearsa...

A word about my profile pic (with the 'nice to see you.' strapline, appropriate for Bsky!) - I took this photo in May in Bedminster, Bristol, when I was part of a panel discussing food security (in a pub!). I lived & worked in Bristol for 12 years, and it's where my omega-3 project was born.

Since everyone seems to be joining the Bluesky community, here's a photo of my GM field trial under what passes for a blue sky in the UK. As a research community, we need to do more experiments in the field, especially if we are making claims about potential impacts etc. Just go outside!

Why the regulation of gene editing in the UK needs to be fully enabling for both crops and farmed animals. www.theguardian.com/science/2024...

Great to see the UK's new Labour government commit to enabling the Precision Breeding Act (2023) - this will make the regulatory path to market for GE crops much clearer and straightforward. An excellent first step in building a GE&GM-based bioeconomy. www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/uk-gove...

Colour my Life. GM Camelina seeds engineered with different traits, including ketocarotenoids and betalain. Using metabolic engineering to do something useful doesn't mean it can't look great too!

We harvested our GM camelina field trial at Rothamsted this week - always a thrill to get to this point. I have been running GM trials since 2014 and they are essential to validate observations made in containment. As a community, we need to do more field trials to reveal viable discoveries.