The James Hutton Institute (JHI) is Scotland’s leading institute on plants and their interactions with the environment, particularly in developing sustainable agriculture to face challenges of food security, climate change, threatened biodiversity, EU pesticide withdrawals and healthy food. JHI’s science underpins some of the UK’s most popular fruit and vegetable varieties (soft fruit, potatoes, crucifers). We have developed unique multi-disciplinary teams to develop Integrated Pest and Disease Management strategies (IPDM), involving entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, molecular biologists, phytochemists, mathematical modelers and statisticians. We have recently developed a new research farm which will be JHI’s research platform for developing sustainable agriculture with facilities to test at field to landscape scales for long term experiments including development of IPDM strategies, testing of new pest and disease resistant varieties, field and landscape scale ecology, soil resilience studies and energy flow in food webs. JHI has state of the art laboratories, glasshouses, controlled environment (CE) rooms and owns two experimental farms.

The JHI Genome Technology group specialises in high-throughput genomics platforms and expertise, including sequencing, genotyping (Illumina) & microarrays. The soft fruit and perennial crop group are at the forefront of research and the translation of science into industry benefits. These include the development of practical tools for pest management e.g. a raspberry beetle trap is now commercialised, and the use of contemporary genomics techniques and the translation of molecular research into breeding solutions e.g. root rot resistance markers and recently developments in high throughput phenotyping (e.g. HL0169, HL0170, HL0175, HL0190, HL0195, TSB 153, Innovate UK 101234, 101819, 131890.). JHI has a long history through its legacy organisations in providing independent, world-class scientific research tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges relating to food and environmental security and sustainable development. These are set in the context of significant global changes in population, increased demand for natural resources, a changing climate and economic and geopolitical policy drivers. The James Hutton Institute combines strengths in crops, soils and land use and environmental research, and makes a major contribution to the understanding of key global issues, such as food, energy and environmental security, and developing and promoting effective technological and management solutions to these.