// Latest Posts

Plant root breakthrough leads to Science paper – Bipin Pandey and Rahul Bhosale tell us how it happened!

Dr. Bipin Kumar Pandey (above) is a Research Fellow in the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham. He received a 12-month PhD+ award from the Future Food Beacon in April 2018. Dr. Rahul Bhosale is a Nottingham Research Fellow in Phenomics and Functional Genomics at the Future Food Beacon, University of Nottingham. He …

Bees and neonicotinoids – what does the science say? – by Prof. David E. Salt

Photo by Roberto Patti on Unsplash DEFRA has announced that, for the 2021 growing season, thiamethoxam will be allowed to treat sugar beet seeds, prior to planting. This is a temporary authorisation for 2021 only but may be extended for the 2022 & 2023 growing seasons. This has understandably caused controversy and elicited passionate reactions. …

From China to the UK during the pandemic – An interview with Dr Yiqun Gao

Dr Yiqun Gao is based at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences. He is a Newton International Fellow at The Future Food Beacon and we are grateful to him for travelling to the UK to take up his Fellowship on 1st November 2020, right in the middle of the UK’s ongoing Covid-19 pandemic! His brave decision …

Rovercam is here! by Lorna McAusland

In July 2020, the Murchie Group at The University of Nottingham took delivery of an exciting new piece of equipment; Rovercam! Measuring over 2 m tall and 1.6 m wide, Rovercam is designed to be wheeled over plots, imaging in a top-down position. Designed for large-scale imaging of field plots, Rovercam is an impressive addition …

Improving Brassica rapa for better nutrition – An interview with Dr Guillermina Mendiondo

Dr Guillermina Mendiondo is an Assistant Professor in Translational Crop Science at The University of Nottingham. She works on different plant species as part of her work on crop molecular genetics within the Future Food Beacon. The origins of the project In 2018, Dr Mendiondo travelled to South Africa and visited farmers in KwaZulu-Natal as …

Chasing auxin through the plant – international collaboration leads to Nature paper – by Anthony Bishopp

Photo (right) by Rita Astrovich on Unsplash Anthony Bishopp is a Royal Society University Research Fellow, Faculty of Science, University of Nottingham When Charles Darwin noticed that plants bend towards light, he performed a series of experiments showing that a mobile signal produced in the growing tip caused the plants to bend at the base. 160 years …

Humanity’s impact on earth – An interview with Matt Jones

Professor Matthew Jones is leading the Palaeobenchmarking Resilient Agricultural Systems (PalaeoRAS) project. He is based in the School of Geography.   Tell me about your work. What do you study?   I’m a Quaternary Scientist, a geologist with a particular interest in the last 2.5 million years of Earth’s history (the Quaternary Period). My own work focusses on the last 20,000 years, the time period since …

The real arsenate reductase stands up! – Is this the end of the HAC story?

Warning: this blog contains some hardcore plant science. Look away now if this is a bit much!  This blog celebrates the publication in the Journal of Experimental Botany of a new paper about arsenate reductase in plants. Dr. Sina Fischer of the Future Food Beacon is the first author on the study and performed much of the work, assisted by a number of co-authors. including Dr Paulina Flis who leads Prof. Salt’s Ionomics Facility. Prof. David E. …

Screening heat tolerance in rice plants – An interview with John Ferguson

Photo by marianne bos on Unsplash John Ferguson is a postdoctoral research fellow on the Palaeobenchmarking Resilient Agricultural Systems (PalaeoRAS) project  Tell me about your work. What do you study?   I am plant ecophysiologist. I perform experiments to understand how plants respond to environment stress. We use the results from these experiments to link variation in the plant’s responses to genetic variation. This …

Reconstructing the ecosystems of the past – An interview with Annegreet Veeken

Annegreet Veeken is a PhD student on the Palaeobenchmarking Resilient Agricultural Systems (PalaeoRAS) project  Why did you decide to do a PhD? What were you doing before? I had a year between ending my masters and starting my PhD. During that year, I worked part-time at a Dutch environmental NGO as a project assistant in water quality and …