A top scientist at SCRI has been awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellowship to pursue his work on the resilience of Scottish agriculture in the face of global environmental change.

Dr Tim George (33) will study plant response to the combined stress of water and nutrient deficiency. This work will help identify cultivars useful for Scotland’s predicted wetter winters and drier summers.

With the onset of climate change, it will be essential that we ensure resilience in our farming systems. In the agricultural landscape of the future, effective use of nutrients by crops will be key to the sustainability of both food production and rural communities.

The main objective of Tim’s research is to identify barley cultivars which cope with the reduced availability of critical nutrients under predicted drier summer conditions.

Understanding the interaction between plant responses to water availability and phosphorus deficiency will be critical. With many of the physiological responses associated with both stresses being shared, it is imperative that such responses are separated to help identify the key driver of relevant phenotypes. (A phenotype is the outward, physical manifestation of the plant.)

Tim will use cutting-edge techniques to identify the genes, transcripts and proteins which control the expression of these relevant phenotypes. Applying this understanding to the barley genetic resources exclusive to SCRI will optimise identification of cultivars better able to cope with our changing world and the future requirements of farmers.

Tim joined SCRI from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, where he’d been working on a Marie Curie International Fellowship based in Canberra.

More information from: Phil Taylor, Head of Communications, SCRI, Invergowrie, Dundee, DD2 5DA.

Tel: 01382 562 731