Genetics and Genomics of the Brassicaceae

Professor Ian Bancroft completed his PhD at the University of Lancaster in 1986 and conducted his early postdoctoral research at Michigan State University, studying the genomes of cyanobacteria. He moved to the John Innes Centre in 1989 and has been expanding and applying his genomics expertise, initially in Arabidopsis thaliana, and since 1998 in the cultivated Brassica species.

Renate Schmidt is leader of the group “Genome plasticity” at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben (Germany). She was educated as a molecular geneticist, and her research interests center on comparative genome analysis in the Brassicaceae and transgene expression in plants.