The National Food Strategy: our Director responds
July 15, 2021
This post is written by Prof David Salt. We welcome the publication of the National Food Strategy today. Since 2017, the Future Food Beacon has spearheaded transdisciplinary research on food systems, clear in the knowledge that our food systems must change in order to preserve population health and the health of the planet. The current …
Understanding plant microbe interactions
July 29, 2020
Dr Gabriel Castrillo is a Nottingham Research Fellow whose research focuses on the definition of the molecular mechanisms of plant-microbe interactions. He has won funding from The Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society and recently, a joint award from the BBSRC (UK) and the National Science Foundation (US) in collaboration with colleagues from the University of …
Plants for future food security: the case of Bambara groundnut
March 23, 2020
Future Food Beacon researchers in Malaysia and UK are working with partners in Africa and Asia to help secure the future of our food supply. They are doing this by exploring the wider use of crop diversity to fill food production and nutrient gaps, making a diverse range of food crops available and accessible to …
How do plant roots branch towards water?
February 27, 2020
Plant roots need to forage for water and nutrients in the soil. These key resources are not distributed equally through the soil so plants therefore have to send their roots towards the best available sources of water and nutrients. If plants couldn’t flexibly adapt to changing conditions in their environments, they would struggle to thrive …
Collaborations with Embrapa to research Brazilian agricultural practices
February 11, 2020
The Future Food Beacon is developing a working partnership with Embrapa, Brazil. Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, is part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply and is concerned with generating knowledge and technology for Brazilian agriculture. In late 2018 and early 2019, supported by the UoN International Collaboration Fund, six Future …
Meet the Beacon: Dr Michael Wilson
March 28, 2019
Michael Wilson is a Senior Research Fellow and Technologist in Bioinformatics for the Future Food Beacon. Michael handles sequencing data, data derived from the DeepSeq facility, and conducts integrative analysis. His role is to support biologists in handling the large amount of data to be produced. Michael is also responsible for the digital requirements of …
CEPHaS: understanding soil water and its potentials for agriculture
January 11, 2019
Conservation agriculture (CA) is a set of practices which have been proposed to improve the resilience and sustainability of crop production, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where food security is endangered by the increasing frequency and intensity of drought seasons under climate change. In CA, the structure of the soil is not disturbed by cultivation, …
Meet the Beacon: Dr Rahul Bhosale
December 20, 2018
We are very excited to introduce Dr Rahul Bhosale. Rahul was a recent recipient of a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship, which he will be taking up in 2019. At present, Rahul is a Nottingham Research Fellow in Phenomics and Functional Genomics, and a member of the Future Food Beacon of Excellence. Rahul uses functional genomic approaches to …
