Osbourn moved to
Norwich in 1985 to work as a post-doctoral researcher at the
John Innes Centre . In 1987 she joined
The Sainsbury Laboratory as a Research Fellow, and she became a group leader in 1999. In 2005 she re-joined the
John Innes Centre as a group leader, and was appointed head of the Department for Metabolic Biology in 2006. Her early work looked at
saponins and their role in plant defence. Osbourn studies how natural products interact with natural organisms. In particular, she has worked on the biosynthesis of
triterpene. She identified that metabolic pathways organise in
operon-like clusters, which allowed her to develop a novel opportunity to discover
natural product pathways through genome mining. The
natural products include
terpenes, which can be used in the
pharmaceutical industry as well as food and manufacturing. Her research has been funded by the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). In 2006, Osbourn became an Honorary Professor at the
University of East Anglia. Since 2014 she has been the director of the OpenPlant Synthetic Biology Research Centre, a
BBSRC and
EPSRC-funded
Synthetic Biology Research Centre led jointly by the John Innes Centre and the University of Cambridge. The Cambridge-based Director is Professor Jim Haseloff and the formal lead is
Professor Sir David Baulcombe. She was the Director of the Norwich Research Park Industrial Biotechnology Alliance from 2013 to 2019. As a group leader at the John Innes Centre she leads a research group working on plant natural products, their biosynthesis, function, mechanisms of metabolic diversification and metabolic engineering. == Public engagement ==