Meet the scientists!

My work is all about looking into how the nutrients plants contain are moved into the seeds when a plant dies or its leaves turn yellow and fall off. These nutrients could have come from the soil and have been taken up by the roots or formed in the leaves by a process called photosynthesis – this is where the energy from the sun is used to make sugars and oxygen. The goal is to understand this process of moving resources around the plant so it can be made even better and more of the plant nutrients can end up in the seeds. This way the improved seeds will hopefully be more nutritious if they are to be eaten or produce crop plants which have higher yields.

As a plant scientist I’m always growing things and the plant I work with most is a weed , so you can’t eat it, but we study this as it is a great model for other plants and lots of work has already been done on it. I do also get to work on a proper crop called oilseed rape though and if you’ve ever seen fields full of yellow flowers then that is probably this crop.

Working on many different projects means that I can keep switching between them which often make my days hectic but far more interesting.  The day normally begins with some computer work, usually from the comfort of my own bed so I can stay in my pyjamas and eat breakfast whilst answering e-mails and planning what needs to be done, all before getting stuck into some exciting lab work. This lab work could be anything from using fancy machines to look at the oil content of seeds to simply counting the numbers of leaves a plant produces. At some point during the day I will always try to go and look at the plants I’m growing, water them and check that they are happy and still alive. I also try to spend some time reading articles which other scientists have published to keep up to date with what’s going on in my field of research and get ideas of where to go next with the project.

Plants are great but the problem with trying to study them is that they grow so slowly that you can’t spend all your lessons just sitting around watching them. The answer to this is to provide equipment so that the students can record the plant growth and then play it back at much faster speeds. This way they can actually see things such as the leaves moving or how plants respond to different environments. This will allow the students to set up fantastic experiments and share with others what they have been doing.