The leading public life science funding agencies in the UK and France have announced a unique cross-channel partnership to enhance international collaboration in systems biology.

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, based in North Star, Swindon, and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche have funded 10 new projects worth £6.5m.

These will use systems biology to work on biological areas such as understanding a plant's body clock, investigating insect responses to pheromones and building a model of signals in the brain.

Each project has at least one UK and one French partner institution and the initiative aims to build European collaboration in Systems Biology.

BBSRC has already invested more than £70m in UK and European systems biology initiatives and the UK is one of the world leaders in this new and growing approach to tackling bioscience problems.

Systems biology is a revolution in the way bioscientists think and work.

It brings together researchers across different disciplines, combining theory, computer modelling and experiments. Systems biology will make the outputs of bioscience research more useful and easier to apply in the real world, as well as advancing our understanding of biological processes.

The new projects will give the researchers involved access to complementary expertise and skills and will help develop the field of Systems Biology by co-ordinating BBSRC and ANR resources.

Mr Steve Visscher, BBSRC interim chief executive, said: "Systems biology holds great promise for delivering real, practical advances in healthcare, biotechnology and environmental research much faster than traditional biology.

"Collaborative initiatives with international partners enable us to increase the impact of our funding and the impact of the research being done by our scientists.

Mrs Jacqueline Lecourtier, ANR general manager, said: "As a young agency created in 2005, this was the first bilateral call undertaken within the Health & Biology Department.

"By answering this call, systems biology growing communities showed that they were ready to share their views and expertises. Moreover, this initiative allowed BBSRC and ANR to fund high quality and cross-disciplinary proposals, which is one of our missions.

11:00am Friday 9th May 2008

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