Norwich Research Park: What is being invented there?

Colour with care

Stella McCartney has already tried it. Now global fashion brand H&M will be working with a Norwich bio-tech company.

Colorifix makes microbes to produce dyes. It identifies naturally-occurring colours – from a plant, animal, insect or microbe – and using online databases finds the genes which cause it to produce that pigment. 

It then builds that DNA, and inserts it into a host bacteria or yeast which acts as a tiny factory, reading the new genetic information and making the pigment in the same way it is produced in nature. 

The microbes grow in a fermenter, the same way beer is brewed, creating vats of dye within a day. 

While the conventional textile and dye industry uses polluting chemicals and refined petrochemicals and large volumes of water, and produces toxic waste, the Colorifix technology replaces chemistry with biology. Each colour can be shipped as tiny amounts of live microorganisms, cutting transport costs, and the process reduces water consumption, electricity use and carbon dioxide emissions.  

Colorifix founders at work (Image: Colorifix)

Pernug kitchen gardens (Image: Pernug Project)

Kitchen garden

The power to add essential nutrients to home-grown food is being developed and tested in Norwich. 

With plant-based diets generally healthier for people and the planet, the vertical vegan Pernug (PERsonalised NUtrition through kitchen Gardens) project will enrich home-grown salad plants with nutrients such as vitamin B12 - vital for red blood cells, energy metabolism and nerve function, but not found naturally in plants. 

It is being created by scientists at Norwich’s Quadram Institute centre for food and health research who are also developing a linked personalised recipe app. 

Soon volunteers from across Norfolk will test the hydroponic kitchen units and recipe app. 

Pulse power

Norwich scientists are making snacks, bread and pasta better for you. 

They have developed a new way of milling flour from pulses such as chickpeas, beans and lentils, improving the nutritional value of foods such as bread, pasta, snacks, meat alternatives and sauces.

Scientists at Norwich's Quadram Institute worked with people from King’s College London and a company called New Food Innovation to create a patented new way of milling,

Normal milling can destroy some of the cell fibre but the new flour, dubbed PulseON, is digested slower, providing more slow-release energy and beneficial starch and fibre.  

Recent clinical trials found that substituting it for wheat flour significantly reduced blood glucose spikes and triggered appetite-control hormones. 

Now a company called PulseON Foods has been created to encourage food manufacturers to use the flour.  

Air-seq was developed in Norwich (Image: Earlham Institute)

The answer is blowing in wind

A machine which can 'taste' air for poisons and pathogens has been developed at Norwich's world class genomics and computational biology facility, the Earlham Institute. Dr Richard Leggett leads a team which has developed technology to detect wind-borne diseases. 

Air-seq takes and analyses air samples, using DNA sequencing. It was initially designed to alert farmers to wind-borne plant diseases but potential uses range from tracking pandemics to identifying biological weapons. 

Until now air samples had to be sent to a laboratory but Air-seq does everything on location, taking gulps of air, condensing it into a liquid and purifying, sequencing and analysing any biological material, issuing immediate alerts if anything worrying is detected. 

Plant meat

A plant-based way to produce medicines, vaccines and ingredients for laboratory grown meat and non-animal derived dairy food has been developed by the company Leaf Expression Systems (Leaf) on Norwich Research Park. 

It produces proteins and biomolecules from plant leaves for scientific, consumer, agricultural and food industries.  

Because they can be made so quickly Leaf speeds up the development of products, including medicines. 

Curing cancer

Inspiralis is part of the global race to develop new antibiotics and cancer drugs. 

It began as a project at the John Innes Centre and supplies, in easy-to-use kits, a type of enzyme known as topoisomerases, to help scientists find new medicines.

The enzymes can correct over or under-winding of DNA - which twists naturally but kills cells if the process runs out of control. Inspiralis exports its kits all over the world and provides screening services to pharmaceutical companies and academia.

Green cars and planes

A Norwich company is helping car and aircraft makers change to bio-materials and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

CellExcel was developed from the work of University of East Anglia chemistry professor Richard Stephenson and is helping manufacturers change from traditional composite materials which consume large amounts of energy to plant-based materials such as flax or hemp. These take less energy to manufacture – and the fields of hemp or flax absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

The Norwich Research Park is home to 40 businesses as well as plant, genome, medical and food science research centres, a university and a hospital.

Researchers are taking on global challenges including how feed growing populations, preventing and treating human, plant and animal diseases and addressing climate change.