Biography
I am a Year in Industry student at the Earlham Institute in the Neil Hall Group. This placement forms part of my undergraduate degree at Durham University, where I am studying for BSc Natural Sciences.
I will be working alongside Mark McMullan, Rowena Hill, and Michelle Grey to understand the important crop disease, wheat take-all. The fungal pathogen Gaeumannomyces tritici (Gt) colonises wheat roots, resulting in reductions of grain quality and yield.
I am interested in exploring the interactions between hosts and fungi, as well as those between fungi of different lifestyles. For example, between Gt and its sister species Gh, which are thought to act antagonistically. This may hold potential as a biocontrol, offering some protection against take-all.
To do this, I will be using both wet-lab skills, such as culturing and crossing fungi, as well as bioinformatics to analyse differences between antagonist genomes.