Current Research
We are currently conducting research on the three main projects listed below.
1) Accessing Plant Diversity by Manipulating Homoeologous Recombination.
- Improving crops requires the introduction of new traits. Thousands of beneficial traits reside in wild relatives of crop species, but reproductive barriers between species makes accessing these traits extremely challenging.
- By identifying factors limiting access to wild traits, the project will help unlock the full diversity of wild germplasm for plant breeders, resulting in faster crop improvement.
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2) Developing new breeding technologies.
- Drugs are used routinely in humans and other mammals to temporarily and non-invasively modify biological processes, but are rarely used in plants, where the cell wall hampers delivery. In plants, biological processes are routinely altered by genetic modification (GM), but the resulting plants have little applied value in the UK and Europe due to restrictions on their use in agriculture. Recently nano particles with excellent drug delivery properties have been shown to efficiently cross plant cell walls, opening up a potential route to efficient non-GM modification of biological processes in plants.
- We are investigating these possibilities and developing small-molecule inhibitors that can be used to modify recombination levels.
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3) Meiotic recombination in autotetraploid and allotetraploid Arabidopsis.
- Autotetraploids have two (almost) identical copies of the genome that origintate from the same parental species. Allotetraploids have two divergent sub-genomes inherited from different (but related) species.
- How do these different types of polyploid deal with the challenges of segregating multiple sets of chromosomes?
