Introducing the IRC Fellowships
Associate Members Tara Dirilgen and Tony Twamley speak about their new IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship projects. While the value of biodiversity to agriculture is being increasingly recognised such as the role of below ground organisms to healthy soils, and the contribution of insect pollination to crops, there is growing evidence that what happens belowground can have impacts on how plants respond aboveground and vice versa. Tara’s research sets out to explore how soil biodiversity might indirectly affect pollinators such as bees and how these might be affected by agricultural management practices. Tony's work investigates the role of receptor-like kinases (RLKs) in defence priming in wheat, which is when plants are stimulated into a state of readiness, enabling them to respond more efficiently to an attack by a pathogen. This study will investigate a role for RLKs in priming for resistance to economically important wheat pathogens that cause powdery mildew, septoria tritici blotch and fusarium head blight disease.
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