Engineering a green future: Professor Anne Osbourn

Plants have been used by humans for thousands of years as a source of medicines and other high-value products. Most of these molecules are too complex to be synthesised using chemistry, at least at commercial scale. The explosion in plant genome sequence data, plus powerful and rapid transient plant expression technology, is now enabling the chemical engineering capability of the plant kingdom. This is being harnessed and deployed for the production of known and new-to-nature chemicals tailored for food, health and industrial applications.

The research of Professor Anne Osbourn OBE, a group leader at the John Innes Centre and previously Co-Director of the BBSRC and EPSRC co-funded OpenPlant Synthetic Biology Research Centre, has significantly contributed towards these developments. Professor Osbourn also acted as a co-Investigator on two BBSRC Networks in Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy (NIBB). Most recently, she received a BBSRC Engineering Biology Mission award to optimise plant production of medically and agriculturally important compounds, called triterpenoids.

Her research into the production of an oat triterpenoid found that genes involved in triterpenoid synthesis were clustered together in the genome, something that is rare in plants. This has paved the way for the discovery of new and important plant products using computational methods, including vaccine adjuvants and anti-cancer drug candidates.