The Fellowship allowed Millar to develop two close collaborations, with Matthew Turner in Physics and David Rand in Maths, at the University of Warwick.
These led to joint work that developed the first mathematical models of the plant circadian clock (Locke et al. 2005a, 2005b, 2006), new models of the fungal circadian clock (Bain et al. 2004, Akman et al. 2008) and a synthetic biology approach to light input for circuits such as clocks, in yeast (Sorokina et al. 2009).
The plant clock models provided a new intellectual framework to understand the increasingly complex interactions uncovered by molecular genetics, and more broadly helped to advance the use of modelling in the Arabidopsis research community.
The first detailed molecular model of photoperiodic flowering control was also built on the plant clock model developed during the RDF funding.