Over the past decade the industry has seen growth in the beer sector with hundreds of "micro-breweries" that demand hops with new, high-impact aroma profiles. Consequently, the development of cultivars with unique aromas has become the focal point of breeding programmes. The success of a new hop variety is not only measured in its brewing qualities. Growers must also be able to grow hops to a profitable standard meaning that a variety must be highly resilient to biotic and abiotic stresses and produce a stable crop over multiple years, amidst conditions of extreme temperatures and low water supply. Thus, hop breeders today are tasked with combining a multitude of desirable traits into a superior hop variety. Hop breeding is currently achieved through studying the plants' traits, such as crop yield, disease resistances and aroma. Selection of favourable breeding lines based on physical trait expression is both time and labour consuming. Screening for Verticillium wilt resistance, for example, requires the infection of clonally propagated, mature hops, while assessing environmental stability requires repeated measurements of multiple plants in different locations over multiple years. Trait selection comes with several inherent problems. Plant traits can be influenced by both genetic and random factors, however, plant breeders can only improve upon the variation that is controlled by genetic factors. Identifying DNA that control traits of interest and then selecting individuals with desirable DNA could bypass the trait observation based selection methods. Thus, by embracing genomic informed breeding tools, a breeding company can gain a competitive advantage in the industry, as it allows them to breed better crops faster. Wye Hops holds a diverse collection of breeding lines displaying variation in resistance to Verticillium wilt and many additional traits, however, the causative genetic components are waiting to be identified, characterised and exploited. Here, we will generate genetic data for all varieties in the collection and use this information to identify genetic regions that control plant resilience. We can then screen individuals for desirable DNA and pyramid multiple resilient traits into high quality hop varieties. This project will provide an environmentally friendly and natural breeding solution to environmental challenges in hop. Through this project, we have the ability to produce environmentally adapted hop varieties with improved agronomy and brewing qualities leading to a direct benefit for UK hop growers.

The project is developing an innovative drug for advanced liver disease including non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) where there are limited existing treatment options. The drug is designed to be administered subcutaneously, selectively target to the liver and increase the expression of a protein in the liver which is down-regulated in disease. Increasing expression of the target protein should both improve the function of normal liver cells impacted by the disease and inhibit the disease itself and thus restore normal liver function. The outcome of the proposed work, if successful, will be a clinical candidate that can be progressed to testing in liver diseases such as NASH as well as a selective delivery platform that can be used with chemically related drugs to treat a range of liver diseases.

This project directly addresses the challenge of improved food security and livelihoods for international development. For about half a billion people in Asia, most of them poor, rice provides over 50% of the caloric supply so the size and stability of the rice harvest is crucial. The simplest way to increase yields is by the breeding of new rice varieties with greater resistance to diseases and pests and improved tolerance to stresses. To help in this breeding all Asian national rice breeding programmes use DNA markers. This project will develop LGC genomics' proprietary molecular technologies (called KASP) by providing thousands of new KASP markers. By the end of the project, KASP will become the marker of choice for rice breeders through greater choice of markers (available for any cross), reduced costs (allowing a three-fold increase in the size of the breeding programme) and increased speed and reliability. This will provide a revolution in rice breeding by making it possible to do genome-wide, selection instead of selecting for markers at a few target traits. A single improved rice variety can increase harvest value by millions of pounds a year so improved rice breeding methods in all Asian countries will have great impact on improved food security and improved farmers' livelihoods.