Anne Osbourn

Anne Elisabeth Osbourn is a professor of biology and group leader at the John Innes Centre, where she investigates plant natural product biosynthesis. She discovered that in the plant genome, the genes involved with biosynthesis organise in clusters. She is also a popular science communicator, poet and is the founder of the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Initiative.

Early life and education Osbourn grew up in West Yorkshire. Her parents both studied and lectured English literature At this time, researchers worked out how to transform the Rhizobium nitrogen fixation genes into the bacterium Escherichia coli. Osbourn studies how natural products interact with natural organisms. In particular, she has worked on the biosynthesis of triterpene. She identified that metabolic pathways organise in operon-like clusters, which allowed her to develop a novel opportunity to discover natural product pathways through genome mining. The natural products include terpenes, which can be used in the pharmaceutical industry as well as food and manufacturing.

Her research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

In 2006, Osbourn became an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. Since 2014 she has been the director of the OpenPlant Synthetic Biology Research Centre, a BBSRC and EPSRC-funded Synthetic Biology Research Centre led jointly by the John Innes Centre and the University of Cambridge. The Cambridge-based Director is Professor Jim Haseloff and the formal lead is Professor Sir David Baulcombe.

She was the Director of the Norwich Research Park Industrial Biotechnology Alliance from 2013 to 2019.

As a group leader at the John Innes Centre she leads a research group working on plant natural products, their biosynthesis, function, mechanisms of metabolic diversification and metabolic engineering.

Public engagement In 2004, Osbourn was appointed to the UEA Creative Writing Course as a Nesta dreamtime fellow. Here she wrote poetry about her life as a plant scientist. Since then Osbourn has become a popular science writer, and inspired by her own creative practice she founded the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Trust in 2005. The SAW Trust is an international charity that promotes innovation in science communication, and works with young people from elementary schools in initiatives which bring together scientists, writers and artists to explore creative science communication initiatives. Over 1,000 children have now taken part in SAW projects in schools in China.

In 2016 Osbourn took part in an international exchange with the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology.

Honours and Editorial positions Osbourn was elected to AcademiaNet in 2014. She is an editor of the New Phytologist She is the thirtieth research who has been elected Fellow from the John Innes Centre.

Patents

2011 Root-specific promoters 2008 Enzymes involved in triterpene synthesis