Question: What do the different research groups in the plant-science department do?

Yvette Wilson answered on 17 Jun 2010:

(sorry for the delay in replying – a bit swamped at the moment 🙂 )
in our plant science department there’s some really cool research going on!
our group (lead by professor Claire Halpin) – works on 1) how plants make lignin, specially barley so that we can decrease lignin because it makes it difficult to get sugars from straws and 2) how the plant mixes up the genes from its parents when it is making pollen and eggs (during meiosis). this is because barley is not very good at doing this so it is difficult to get different combinations of genes that may mean you get better varieties.
Professor Paul Birch – works on how plants defend themselves against pathogens and then how the pathogens defend themselves from the plant’s defense then how the plants counter defend themselves against the pathogens counter defense! He mainly uses the potato blight fungus to study this.
Professor John Brown studies how genes are translated by the cell machinery to make proteins.
Professor Andy Flavell studies how crop genomes evolve and whether wild barley have any genes that may be useful for domesticated barley.
Dr Steve Hubbard studies how plants interact with insects, mainly aphids and which bacteria aphids need in their gut to survive.
Dr Gordon Simpson studies how genes determine when plants flower as plants have to integrate signals on their resources that are available to make flowers, the temperature and the daylength.
Dr Edgar Huitema studies how fungi get past the plant’s defenses and therefore devastates many crops.

These are all the group leaders in the department. They then employ researchers to work on specific aspects of each project.