The James Hutton Institute combines strengths in crops, soils and land use and environmental research, and makes a major contribution to the understanding of key global issues, such as food, energy and environmental security, and developing and promoting effective technological and management solutions to these.

The Institute is an internationally networked organization and operates from multiple sites, including two main ones in Scotland at Aberdeen and Dundee. It employs more than 500 scientists and support staff, making it one of the biggest research centres in the UK and the first of its type in Europe. The Institute is one of the Scottish Government’s main research providers in environmental, crop and food science and has a major role in the Scottish knowledge economy. The Institute brought together the former Macaulay Land Use Research Institute and the Scottish Crop Research Institute on 1 April 2011.
 

Role in PRO-GRACE

The Information and Computational Sciences group at JHI create software and resources for the collection, storage, visualization and analysis of plant (pre) breeding and experimental genetics data. Developing tools ranging from GridScore for data collection (Raubach et al. 2022) to Germinate for the storage of data (Raubach et al. 2021, Shaw et al. 2017) and Helium for visualization (Shaw et al. 2014) the tools that the information systems group create are used around the world and support a number of high profile international pre-breeding and genetics projects such as the Norwegian Government funded ‘CWR’, ‘Templeton’ and ‘BOLD’ projects which are administered by the Crop Trust, EU Horizon2020 BreedingValue and Horizon Europe BEST-CROP which starts in 2023. These projects use the informatics software that the group at JHI develops to help them manage their data. In PRO-GRACE JHI as an associate partner will provide advice and support in how the experimental data that the project will generate can be stored and visualized.

Main Contacts

Paul Shaw

Research Leader – Information Systems

[email]

Sebastian Raubach

Senior Research Software Engineer

Gaynor McKenzie

Commonwealth Potato Collection (CPC) Curator