Question: What are you currently working on? Do you work on food crops to enhance food security? What do you enjoy most about working with plants?

Ross Alexander answered on 20 Mar 2020:

Hi there,
At the moment i am working on a couple of projects related to drought and how they affect food crops. I am looking primarily at the effect on barley but i also work with a model plant species called Arabidopsis.
We use this plant as it is easy to manipulate and its genetics are very well understood.
The work i do is very much in the area of food security. The planet is slowly warming up and when you couple this with an ever growing population monster then this has serious implications for our food supply. You could already argue that it has had an effect.

In order to cope with a growing population we need to produce more food in the next 30 years than we have ever produced in the entire history of man and all this with an estimated 30% less land. A huge challenge. So my works aims to look at how we can make crops more resilient to drought conditions and be able to grow with way less water. We actually published a paper last year where we made barley that can survive for 4 weeks without water (this was GM modification)

So i think enjoy working with plants because they are massively important to our day to day lives. There is so much variation in them and we know only a fraction of how they work. They are a challenge to work with though as they need a lot of love and attention to grow.