A PhD placement with AB InBev in the USA
June 5, 2020
Jasmine Littler is a BBSRC-iCASE funded PhD candidate in the School of Biosciences. Her project is titled: Enhancing barley environmental stress tolerance through targeted mutagenesis. She is supervised by Dr Guillermina Mendiondo and co-supervised by Prof David Cook. As part of her PhD programme, Jasmine visited the AB InBev Barley Research Centre in Fort Collins, …
Understanding oil crop sustainability: An interview with Dr Thomas Alcock
May 27, 2020
Dr Thomas Alcock is a postdoctoral researcher with the Future Food Beacon, researching oil crops and sustainability. Prior to this role, he held a Future Food Doctoral award, in which he worked on identifying the genetic basis of magnesium uptake in Brassica crops, with the hope of developing more nutritious vegetables. Here, he shares with …
UK Plant Health Week: A conversation with a plant pathologist
April 21, 2020
2020 is the International Year of Plant Health and April 20-27 is UK Plant Health Week. We spoke to Dr Rumiana Ray, a Crop Pathologist, about the importance of plant health, and what you can do to support keeping plants healthy. You are a specialist in crop pathology, what does that mean? Plant pathologists …
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 …
The new agricultural bill: soils, sustainability and farming
February 4, 2020
It may have already left your news feed, but a few weeks ago a new agricultural bill was presented in parliament. We spoke to some of our local soil and plant scientists, Prof Sacha Mooney, President of the British Society of Soil Science, and Prof Malcolm Bennett, and Prof David Salt on what the new …
Doing science in the field: stories from our Colombian cocoa project
January 16, 2020
Dr Christopher Moore and Dr David Gopaulchan travelled to Colombia together in May 2019 to carry out scientific sampling of the cocoa fermentation process on different farms. David recently travelled back to Colombia for the second harvest, to conduct further sampling, in November and December 2019. We spoke to David and Chris about the experiences, …
The importance of zinc in cereal crops: An interview with Veronica Guwela
November 11, 2019
Veronica Guwela is a UoN-Rothamsted PhD student recipient. Their project is titled: ‘High zinc wheat for sub-Saharan Africa’ and they are supervised by Prof Julie King (UoN), Dr Malcolm Hawkesford (RRes), Prof Martin Broadley (UoN) and Prof Moses Maliro (LUANAR) . Why did you decide to do a PhD? What were you doing before? I decided …
The Future Food Beacon MakerSpace
August 21, 2019
We spoke to Principal Research Fellow Darren Wells, Dr Jonathan Atkinson, and Dr Michael Wilson about the new MakerSpace, located in the Plant Sciences building here on Sutton Bonington campus. Tell us about the MakerSpace… The Future Food Beacon MakerSpace is an innovation hub established to support experimental and outreach activities in Biosciences and elsewhere. …
Duckweed: plant for the future!
August 15, 2019
One of the wonderful things about science is the sense of exploration into the expanse of the unknown. Finding future food sources, particularly protein, outside of livestock, is becoming increasingly important, for both human and animal diets. It is easy, despite the myriad of possible research avenues, to become stuck down a single trajectory, chipping …
Working between the field and the lab: understanding barley
August 1, 2019
August 1st is Lammas, a day traditionally celebrating the first harvests of the season. Summer wheat, oats, rye, and barley grains are all harvested from now until October, and the first loaf of bread is baked with the new grains. How does the beginning of the harvest season affect our researchers and their work? Dr Guillermina …
