Author name: borrillp

My adventures with Aegilops tauschii to understand starch granule formation

Growing up in Norfolk, I’ve always been exposed to plants; you can’t drive very far without seeing fields of wheat, barley and sugar beet growing. Perhaps it was no surprise that I ended up specialising in plant science at university. However, my course only whetted my appetite for plant science and left me with many […]

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Solving the living puzzle: Homoeolog interaction in polyploid genomes

Many economically important crops, such as wheat, cotton and coffee are allopolyploids, i.e., they originated from hybridisation of two or more species followed/preceded by whole genome duplication. The cells of these organisms therefore contain at least two different subgenomes which mutually coexist together. These subgenomes also express their corresponding “homoeologous” genes and understanding their interaction

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Unravelling the genetic relationships between cereals and their microbiome

Cereals, like other plants, live in association with a myriad of microorganisms collectively referred to as the plant microbiome. These interactions are particularly dynamic in the rhizosphere, the thin interface between roots and soil1. The rhizosphere microbiome can provide cereals with “external traits” derived from the ability of these microbes to, for instance, gain access

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The plight of the wheat bioinformatician: when your genome reference sequence changes more often than Taylor Swift’s boyfriend

I did my PhD at the University of Liverpool performing mutant identification and epigenetic studies in wheat. These analyses heavily involved the use of bioinformatics. As I had no prior bioinformatics experience, having previously worked identifying treatment response biomarkers for human chronic lymphocytic leukemia, it was a steep learning curve for me, particularly in my

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