Farmers are running out of options as climate change brings erratic rainfall and new crop diseases, while cutting agrochemical use is essential to protect biodiversity. This project tackles that bind by engineering the hidden half of plants—their roots—to make them more resilient without extra chemicals. Roots do more than anchor plants; they forage for water and nutrients with help from beneficial soil bacteria. The researcher will use integrase enzymes—molecular tools that make precise, permanent changes to DNA—to redesign root architecture for deeper growth and to strengthen the plant’s partnership with helpful microbes. This is fundamental science: understanding how roots build complex structures and how bacteria can be programmed to boost nutrient uptake and fend off pathogens. If successful, the work could lead to crop varieties that thrive with less water and fewer fertilisers, reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint. The tools developed here—integrase-based genetic engineering for both plants and bacteria—could also open new routes for sustainable farming that the UK’s food system quietly depends on.
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As a result of climate change, agriculture is facing the twin challenges of unpredictable rainfall and rapid expansions in the geographical ranges of pests and pathogens. These are expected to negatively impact food production, challenging the UK economy and our ability to feed a growing world population. Increasing the use of agrochemicals is undesirable due to negative consequences to biodiversity and plant pathogen resistance. A sustainable alternative is to develop plant varieties with improved genetics that are better suited for cultivation in a changing climate, and to promote plant-beneficial bacteria colonisation increasing nutrients available to the plant and protecting it from pathogens. An essential and hidden part of plants are their roots, which mediate nutrient and water uptake. In the context of climate change, root systems need to become more resilient to recurrent droughts and more efficient at absorbing scarce resources from the soil. Nutrient and water uptake is achieved through interactions with beneficial soil micro-organisms present in the soil, which help the root to absorb nutrients and protect the plants from pathogens. Therefore, improving both the root structure of plants and the symbiosis between the root and its microbiome is a promising strategy to support sustainable crop production. I will engineer root and root microbiomes, developing plants with deep-root architecture, suited to foraging for limited water supplies and engineer interactions between plants and beneficial microbes to promote nutrient uptake. To do this, I will use my unique expertise in an innovative technology based on integrases: enzymes that mediate site-specific and irreversible changes to DNA sequences. In previous work, I have used integrases to induce the expression of genes under specific combinations of signals in bacteria and plants. This technological development shows that this project is timely in allowing the application of engineering principles to precisely modify the physiology of plants and microbes to improve agriculture. In this project, I will first work on understanding how roots develop complex structures that enable access to unevenly distributed soil resources. In parallel, I will develop integrase-based technology for plant-beneficial bacteria. Finally, I will engineer root structures, root microbiomes, and their interactions. In the long term, this work will develop new tools and approaches for engineering plants and bacteria and provide solutions for sustainable agriculture.
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