Many congratulations to John Lunn, of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology, who has now taken over as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Botany.

We are excited to start the next phase of this hugely challenging project. For this phase, as we focus our goals, we say goodbye and a huge thank you to partners from IRRI, University of Toronto, Heinrich Heine University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology – all of whom have made significant contributions to the project over many years. We welcome Alain Tissier from the Leibniz Institute of Biochemistry, who brings new expertise in genome engineering to the team.

Congratulations to Professor Mark Stitt, Dr John Lunn (both Max Planck Institute), Professor Dan Voytas (University of Minnesota) and Professor Dirk Inzé (Ghent University) who have been named in the Highly Cited Researchers list for 2019.  The list recognizes the world’s most influential researchers, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science.

We have just heard that John Sheehy passed away on Friday. The C₄ Rice project was his vision, and without his determination to battle the sceptics it would never have started. He managed us through the early stages and until recently he was engaged with progress both at project and individual levels. Hopefully we will deliver his ambitious goal.

The below photo was taken of John during a visit to Seattle in 2008 to talk to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation about funding the C₄ Rice Project.

The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of Dan Voytas as a member, and Jane Langdale a foreign associate, of the NAS. They join only a handful of plant scientists to have received this honour, and we are immensely proud of their achievement. Congratulations!

See here for more details.

Many thanks to everyone in the project for their contributions throughout 2018, and towards an informative and productive annual meeting.

We saw some personnel changes in 2018 – Sherif El Sharnoubi and Olga Sedelnikova have left the project, and we wish them all the best as they move on to new roles. We welcome Maria Ermakova (Australian National University) and Andy Plackett (University of Cambridge).

Following on from a successful 2018, we enter 2019 full of excitement and optimism – watch this space (and follow us on Twitter) for updates!

Three researchers from within the C4 Rice Project – Professor Andreas Weber (Heinriche Heine University), Professor Mark Stitt and Dr John Lunn (Max Planck Institute) – were named in this year’s Highly Cited Researchers list, published by Clarivate Analytics and Web of Science. The list recognises world-class researchers selected for their exceptional research performance, demonstrated by production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science. 

Once again we all gathered to discuss the year’s progress and highlights – on the riverside in Bangkok. It has been a good year with some substantial papers published (see publications). Sadly we said goodbye to two of our postdocs – Hugo Alonso and Dong Yeon Lee – we wish them the very best in their new projects/roles.

The path to C₄ rice  is complex but we got one step closer along the evolutionary trajectory form C₃ to C₄ as outlined in our latest paper published in Current Biology

Years of collaborative effort by many in the team leads to a more manageable number of genes to analyse. See – http://rdcu.be/tSU0