Anne Osbourn is a Group Leader at the John Innes Centre working on plant natural products. Her discovery that in plant genomes the genes needed to make particular natural products are often organised in clusters like ‘beads on a string’ has greatly accelerated the discovery of new pathways and chemistries.  She has established a synthetic biology platform based on transient plant expression that provides rapid access to previously inaccessible compounds and analogs at gram scale. These two step changes open up new routes to combine genomics and synthetic biology to synthesize and access previously inaccessible natural products and analogs for medicinal, agricultural and industrial applications. 

Anne was awarded the Novozymes 2023 Award in recognition of her scientific contributions.  She is also a poet, and has developed and co-ordinates the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Initiative (www.sawtrust.org), a cross-curricular science education outreach programme. Her prize-winning poetry collection ‘Mock Orange’ was published in 2020 and her second collection ‘Rockall’ will be out in early 2026.