To meet expected demand, the world will need to produce 50 percent more food in 2050 than it did in 2012. While similar growth rates have been achieved in the past, future growth faces the additional pressure of climate change and the need for reduced chemical inputs. Sustainably enhancing agricultural production is therefore a major challenge facing the sector. A valuable source of traits for disease resistance and abiotic stress tolerance resides in thousands of living wild crop relatives. Accessing these traits for plant breeding, however, is limited by "genetic drag", where low levels of genetic exchange (recombination) means that both desirable and undesirable "wild traits" are introduced and can be difficult to separate. Boosting recombination overcomes genetic drag allowing access to diverse germplasm, as well as increasing the efficiency of traditional breeding programs, helping generate the new combinations of traits required for crop improvement in fewer generations. Recombination can be increased in plants 8-fold by knocking out anti-recombinase genes. However, establishing multigene knockouts in every breeding program is not practical, approaches used to generate mutants may preclude cultivation in tightly (GMO) regulated environments and the mutations introduced can reduce fertility, so wild type alleles must be restored prior to cultivation. Transiently increasing recombination without modification of the recombination machinery itself would solve these problems. To achieve this goal, we will use high-throughput screening assays to identify small molecule inhibitors of key recombination suppressing proteins that can be used to transiently boost recombination in a wide variety of crop species. To identify inhibitors, we will design targeted compound libraries for screening based on molecules identified in large biomedical drug screens that inhibit human orthologs of our target proteins. In addition, virtual screening of large compound libraries will be used to identify further compounds of interest for testing. We will also identify and/or develop plant versions of peptides known to boost recombination in mammalian systems. Once identified, delivery of recombination boosting small-molecules will be optimised for use in crops. This will be initially be undertaken in Brassica and barley, covering a dicot crop closely related to the model plant Arabidopsis, and a key grain crop, both with well-developed cytological tools. Another route for crop development is to incorporate the traits and diversity of two genomes into a single individual - known as allopolyploidy. Allopolyploid plants are common in agriculture (e.g. wheat and cotton) as their fixed hybrid nature usually results in improved agricultural traits. Despite their potential, previous attempts to generate new allopolyploid crops have failed as they tend to have genomic instability and low fertility due to recombination between the two sub-genomes. Two interacting genes have recently been implicated in suppressing this inter-genomic recombination and we will assess the potential to use/modify these genes, and others in the same pathway, to engineer a stable meiosis in new allopolyploids. If successful we will use this approach to generate new genetically stable allopolyploid Brassica and pasture grasses. This multi-disciplinary project, draws on expertise of the Fellow and Project Partners in molecular plant science, phenomics, plant breeding, polyploidy, medicinal chemistry and biochemistry to modify recombination in plants for accelerated plant breeding, helping to develop the high nutrition, climate ready and disease resistant crops needed to meet future food needs. The final three years of the project will involve product development in collaboration with breeding companies to optimise delivery and effectiveness during plant breeding and establishment of a start-up company to commercialise the product(s) developed.

Methane is a powerful long-lived greenhouse gas that is second only to carbon dioxide in its radiative forcing potential. Understanding the Earth's methane cycle at regional scales is a necessary step for evaluating the effectiveness of methane emission reduction schemes, detecting changes in biological sources and sinks of methane that are influenced by climate, and predicting and perhaps mitigating future methane emissions. The growth rate of atmospheric methane has slowed since the 1990s but it continues to show considerable year-to-year variability that cannot be adequately explained. Some of the variability is caused by the influence of weather on systems in which methane is produced biologically. When an anomalous increase in atmospheric methane is detected in the northern hemisphere that links to warm weather conditions, typically wetlands and peatlands are thought to be the cause. However, small lakes and ponds commonly are overlooked as potential major sources of methane emissions. Lakes historically have been regarded as minor emitters of methane because diffusive fluxes during summer months are negligible. This notion has persisted until recently even though measurements beginning in the 1990s have consistently shown that significant amounts of methane are emitted from northern lakes during spring and autumn. In the winter time the ice cover isolates lake water from the atmosphere and the water column become poor in oxygen and stratified. Methane production increases in bottom sediment and the gas spreads through the water column with some methane-rich bubbles rising upwards and becoming trapped in the ice cover as it thickens downward in late winter. In spring when the ice melts the gas is released. Through changes in temperature and the influence of wind the lake water column mixes and deeper accumulations of methane are lost to the atmosphere. In summer the water column stratifies again and methane accumulates once more in the bottom sediments. When the water column become thermally unstable in the autumn and eventually overturns the deep methane is once again released although a greater proportion of it appears to be consumed by bacteria in the autumn. Lakes differ in the chemistry of their water as well as the geometry of their basins. Thus it is difficult to be certain that all lakes will behave in this way but for many it seems likely. The proposed study will measure the build-up of methane in lakes during spring and autumn across a range of ecological zones in North America. The focus will be on spring build-up and emissions because that gas is the least likely to be influenced by methane-consuming bacteria. However, detailed measurements of methane emissions will also be made in the autumn at a subset of lakes. The measurements will then be scaled to a regional level using remote sensing data providing a 'bottom-up' estimate of spring and autumn methane fluxes. Those results will be compared to a 'top-down' estimate determined using a Met Office dispersion model that back-calculates the path of air masses for which the concentration of atmospheric methane has been measured at global monitoring stations in order to determine how much methane had to be added to the air during its passage through a region. Comparing estimates by these two approaches will provide independent assessments of the potential impact of seasonal methane fluxes from northern lakes. In addition measurements of the light and heavy versions of carbon and hydrogen atoms in methane (C, H) and water (H) will be measured to evaluate their potential use as tracer for uniquely identifying methane released by lakes at different latitudes. If successful the proposed study has the potential to yield a step-change in our perception of the methane cycle by demonstrating conclusively that a second major weather-sensitive source of biological methane contributes to year-to-year shifts in the growth rate of atmospheric methane.

A-CURE tackles one of the most challenging and persistent problems in atmospheric science - to understand and quantify how changes in aerosol particles caused by human activities affect climate. Emissions of aerosol particles to the atmosphere through industrial activity, transport and combustion of waste have increased the amount of solar radiation reflected by the Earth, which has caused a cooling effect that partly counteracts the warming effect of greenhouse gases. The magnitude of the so-called aerosol radiative forcing is highly uncertain over the industrial period. According to the latest intergovernmental panel (IPCC) assessment, the global mean radiative forcing of climate caused by aerosol emissions over the industrial period lies between 0 and -2 W m-2 compared to a much better understood and tighter constrained forcing of 1.4 W m-2 to 2.2 W m-2 due to CO2 emissions. This large uncertainty has persisted through all IPCC assessments since 1996 and significantly limits our confidence in global climate change projections. The aerosol uncertainty therefore limits our ability to define strategies for reaching a 1.5 or 2oC target for global mean temperature increase. A-CURE aims to reduce the uncertainty in aerosol radiative forcing through the most comprehensive ever synthesis of aerosol, cloud and atmospheric radiation measurements combined with innovative ways to analyse global model uncertainty. The overall approach will be to produce a large set of model simulations that spans the uncertainty range of the model input parameters. Advanced statistical methods will then be used to generate essentially millions of model simulations that enable the full uncertainty of the model to be explored. The spread of these simulations will then be narrowed by comparing the simulated aerosols and clouds against extensive atmospheric measurements. Following A-CURE, improved estimates of aerosol forcing on regional and global scales will enable substantial improvements in our understanding of historical climate, climate sensitivity and climate projections. We will use the improved climate model with narrowed uncertainty to determine the implications for reaching either a 1.5 or 2oC target for global mean temperature increase.

Complex fluid flows are ubiquitous in both the natural and man-made worlds. From the pulsatile flow of blood through our bodies, to the pumping of personal products such as shampoos or conditioners through complex piping networks as they are processed. For such complex fluids the underlying microstructure can give rise to flow instabilities which are often totally absent in "simple" Newtonian fluids such as water or air. For example, many wormlike micellar surfactant ("soap/detergent") systems are known to exhibit shear-banding where the homogenous solution splits into two (or more) bands of fluid: such flows are often unstable to even infinitesimally small perturbations. At higher pump speeds the flows can develop chaotic motion caused by the elastic normal-stresses developed in flow. Such "elastic turbulence" can also develop for other flowing complex fluids, such as polymer solutions and melts, and give rise to new phenomena. Often such instabilities are unwelcome, for example in rheometric devices when the aim is to measure material properties or in simple pumping operations when they can give rise to unacceptably large pressure drops and prevent pumping. In other cases they can give rise to enhanced mixing of heat and mass which would otherwise be difficult to achieve (e.g. microfluidics applications).

Cochlear implants (CIs) restore hearing to severely and profoundly deaf people by electrically stimulating the auditory nerve. Many CI patients understand speech well in quiet surroundings, but all struggle to hear well in noisy situations. In addition, the perception of pitch is usually very poor and this greatly reduces the enjoyment of music. Because normal-hearing listeners use differences in pitch between sounds to tell them apart this also contributes the difficultiess CI listeners experience when many people are talking at the same time. Our research proposal investigates ways of alleviating these problems. One strand of our approach aims to produce selective activation of the auditory nerve whilst still producing a sound sensation that is loud enough. This is important for two reasons. First, information from each frequency band of speech is sent to one electrode, with the aim of stimulating just a few neurons close to it. Unfortunately the electrical current spreads broadly to other electrodes, thereby smearing the neural response to the sound. Second, current sometimes spreads outside of the cochlea and stimulates the facial nerve, causing unpleasant twitching that can prevent the patient from using their CI. We have designed new ways of stimulating the electrodes that we hope will solve these problems, and will test them with CI patients. To better understand our results we compare them to the predictions of a computer model of the auditory system, and, in turn, use the experimental results to improve the model. We are particularly interested in how the health of the auditory nerve, which degenerates following deafness, influences the effectiveness of methods - including our own - that are designed to produce selective stimulation and improve speech perception. To do so we include measurements of two particular groups of patients. One of these are those who have become suddenly deaf in a way that is believed to leave the auditory nerve intact, and we compare them to long-term-deaf users. The other consists of children with a condition known to affect the auditory nerve, with recent evidence that it may particularly affect neurons that innervate the apex of the cochlea, which normally responds to low-frequency sounds. A second strand focusses on the poor pitch perception by CI users. Some manufacturers have tried to improve pitch perception by presenting fine timing information to a subset of the electrodes, in the cochlear apex, as part of the speech-processing strategy (which converts sound to a pattern of electrical impulses). Unfortunately, very little is known about how CI listeners actually process this information, and this is the subject of the first part of this strand. These methods usually present different patterns to each electrode, and we suspect that pitch perception would be better with the same pattern applied to all of these apical electrodes. If our first experiments show that this is indeed the case, we will implement and test new speech-processing strategies which we hope will improve pitch perception while still clearly conveying all the other information that is needed for good speech perception. Finally, we use electrophysiological methods to help understand the neural basis for poor perception by CI listeners, especially that occurring when the pitch is quite high