Babraham research groups are united under one roof
Doug Kell and Michael Wakelam Babraham Institute B570 opening
A variety of academic research groups seeking to address challenges such as healthy aging have been united under one roof.
The Babraham Institute opened a new research building last Wednesday (February 27) in the year it celebrates its 65th anniversary.
The building was officially opened by Professor Douglas Kell, chief executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BBSRC which provides strategic funding for the institute.
“BBSRC makes a significant investment in the Babraham Institute as part of its strategy to ensure the UK delivers innovative, world-class bioscience research and training, delivering social and economic benefit for the UK and the rest of the world,” he said.
“The co-location of wet and dry research in this impressive new building will enable greater interplay between the new computational biology research groups and the excellent existing research base at Babraham.
“This facility will drive forward our understanding of the basic bioscience underpinning lifelong health and ageing.”
As lifespans increase and society ages, understanding ageing and how to stay healthier for longer is a new research priority worldwide.
Babraham scientists are studying biological processes, such as developmental regulation in the womb, cell signalling processes and diseases at the molecular and cellular levels to gain a greater understanding of how our bodies change during normal ageing, what this tells us about the process of age-related disorders, and how the period of healthy ageing could be extended.
Professor Michael Wakelam, director of the Babraham Institute said, “The opening of our new building heralds a new era in Babraham’s research as we celebrate the 65th Anniversary of the institute this year.
“The appointment of new research scientists in computational biology and the integration of all our research laboratories in one contiguous building will enable greater interaction between ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ science.
“We hope that this will facilitate more cross-talk between our research communities, bringing new insight to the process of normal ageing and enabling the application of this knowledge to age-related disease.”
The Babraham Institute is a world leader in the field of epigenetics – it is now well established that epigenetics is the ‘integrator’ between the environment and the genome and that external factors like nutritional signals may have consequences later in life or on future generations.
To mark the occasion a symposium celebrating epigenetics research at Babraham and across the University of Cambridge followed the official opening ceremony, drawing over 140 scientists from academia and industry.
Professor Wolf Reik, associate director at the Babraham Institute and Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge, said: “This symposium enabled scientists, from diverse fields in both academia and industry, to discuss the latest findings from some of the leading epigenetics research labs in the world.
“A more integrated research environment provided by our new building will bring our computational biologists into closer proximity with the established programmes in epigenetics and nuclear dynamics to help unravel the epigenomic processes regulating our genomes.
“Altered regulation of the epigenome is likely to underlie many human diseases and the ability to analyse whole epigenomes during normal development and healthy ageing may provide insight for the development of epigenetic-based therapies as well as a greater understanding of how epigenomes are modified by the environment.”
The speakers included Professors Azim Surani (Gurdon Institute), David Baulcombe (Department of Plant Sciences), Tony Kouzarides (Gurdon Institute), Simon Tavare (Cancer Research UK, Cambridge), Shankar Balasubramanian (Department of Chemistry) and Anne Ferguson-Smith (Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience).
Professor Ferguson-Smith explained the consequences of maternal undernourishment during pregnancy and how this can have an impact on the health of resulting offspring in adulthood.
The speakers discussed how epigenetic information is thought to be inherited across generatioFor ans, providing a shorter term and flexible type of inheritance in response to environmental signals.
For all the latest newss ee Thursday’s (March 14) Echo.
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Thursday 20 June 2013
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