Plant Breeding Institute

John Innes Centre

The John Innes Centre (JIC)
Headquarters	Norwich, UK
Key people	Dale Sanders Mike Bevan
Parent organization	John Innes Horticultural Institution (JIHI)
Affiliations	The Sainsbury Laboratory University of East Anglia Institute of Food Research
Website	www.jic.ac.uk
Formerly called	The John Innes Institute (JII) Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory (NFL) Plant Breeding Institute (PBI)

The John Innes Centre (JIC), located in Norwich, Norfolk, England, is an independent centre for research and training in plant and microbial science. It is a registered charity (No 223852) grant-aided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the European Research Council (ERC) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is a member of the Norwich Research Park. In 2014, JIC was awarded a silver Athena SWAN Charter award for equality in the workplace.

The John Innes Horticultural Institution was founded in 1910 at Merton Park, Surrey (now London Borough of Merton), with funds bequeathed by John Innes, a merchant and philanthropist. The Institution occupied Innes's former estate at Merton Park until 1945 when it moved to Bayfordbury, Hertfordshire. It moved to its present site in 1967.

John Innes compost was developed by the institution in the 1930s.

In the 1980s, the administration of the John Innes Institute was combined with that of the Plant Breeding Institute (formerly at Trumpington, Cambridgeshire) and the Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory. In 1994, following the relocation of the operations of other two organisations to the Norwich site, the three were merged as the John Innes Centre.

The institute is divided into six departments: Biological Chemistry, Cell & Developmental Biology, Computational & Systems Biology, Crop Genetics, Metabolic Biology and Molecular Microbiology.

JIC has a tradition of training PhD students and post-docs. PhD degrees obtained via JIC are awarded by the University of East Anglia. JIC has a contingent of postdoctoral researchers, many of whom are recruited onto the institute's Post-doctoral Training Fellowship programme. JIC also sponsors seminars and lectures, including the Bateson Lecture and the Biffen Lecture.