Simon Griffiths

Simon Griffiths


About him:

Professor Simon Griffiths is a tenured project leader in the department of Crop Genetics at the John Innes Centre (JIC). He is interested in pre-breeding in wheat with the aim of discovering new and useful genetic variation to achieve future breeding targets. To achieve this he leads one of the four work packages (WP3 Germplasm) of Designing Future Wheat which is the integrated wheat research programme for the UK. He has also worked for several projects which include: leading the landrace pillar of WISP (http://www.wheatisp.org), a unique BBSRC programme for the discovery of new and useful genetic variation not currently available to breeding; leading the development of genetics and genomics resources for WGIN (http://www.wgin.org.uk) a long term defra research platform that joins the academic and commercial UK wheat community; and the coordination of an EU FP7 project with the acronym ADAPTAWHEAT, tackling  adaptation to climate change in bread wheat (http://www.jic.ac.uk/ADAPTAWHEAT/index.htm). Simon was jointly responsible for the positional cloning of Ph1 the regulator of meiotic chromosome pairing in polyploidy wheat and pioneered QTL Mendelisation and subsequent cloning in bread wheat. He is highly collaborative with strong links to commercial wheat breeding partners and international collaborators, particularly CIMMYT and INRA.


His talk:

"A breeders toolkit for the delivery of ancient alleles to modern wheat"