PhD Student Vacancy Only : Leaving home - how cereals shed their grain in Dundee

Cereals are our most important staple foods, supplying about 50% of global dietary energy. Cereal crops were domesticated from their wild progenitors thousands of years ago. In their wild form, mature grains naturally fall from the plant in a process called shattering. Early farmers collected and replanted wild cereals with rare mutations that prevented this seed loss, allowing the grains to stay attached. Cultivating these non-shattering grains was an innovation that marked the beginning of agriculture and greatly influenced human society.

After harvest, the edible grain must be separated from the rest of the plants in a process known as threshing. Thus, non-shattering and easy-to-thresh seeds were among the earliest traits selected during cereal crop domestication and improvement. Wheat and barley were both domesticated in the Fertile Crescent over 10,000 years ago. In wheat, changes in a gene known as Q led to both non-shattering and free-threshing grains. In barley, non-shattering is controlled by two genes named non-Brittle Rachis 1 (Btr1) and Btr2, while the gene responsible for easy threshing remains unknown.

Identifying the genes that control these important domestication traits, and understanding how they work together, is crucial for tracing the history of crop domestication and for improving these traits in wild or less domesticated cereals. This will help meet the challenge of increasing global food production by 60% by 2050 to feed the rising world population.

In this PhD project, you will use barley mutants to characterise the candidate genes controlling shattering and threshability in barley and investigate their genetic interactions. You will also determine whether these genes work the same or different way in barley and wheat. The project offers flexibility to integrate your own intellectual input for gene functional studies. The comprehensive training in molecular biology, cell biology, genetics and crop science will competitively equip you for a career in science in either academia or industry.

You will be based in the McKim lab at the University of Dundee, a dynamic, productive and supportive research group studying cereal development, and the Yu lab at the James Hutton Institute (JHI), with the expertise of studying cereal shattering. Our labs are both based at the Crop Innovation Centre at the JHI, a global leader in cereal genetics and genomics, and part of the International Barley Hub, a £62 million investment in cereal research. We welcome students from diverse backgrounds. Please feel free to contact the supervisors to discuss any aspects of the project or about PhD studies in general.

This 4yr PhD project is a competition jointly funded by The James Hutton Institute and the University of Dundee. This opportunity is open to UK students and will provide funding to cover a stipend and UK level tuition. International students may apply, but must fund the difference in fee levels between UK level tuition and international tuition fees. Students must meet the eligibility criteria as outlined in the UKRI guidance on UK and international candidates. Applicants will have a first-class honours degree in a relevant subject or a 2.1 honours degree plus Masters (or equivalent).