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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.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.