Rachel Rusholme Pilcher

As a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthony Hall’s Group I am working on a BBSRC funded project that brings together field phenotyping and next generation genomics to investigate drought tolerance in bread wheat. In collaboration with researchers in India at ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat Barley Research (IIWBR) and ICAR-National Institute Abiotic Stress Management (NIASM) together with the University of Lancaster, a wheat diversity panel consisting of over 300 lines prescreened for drought and heat tolerance will be extensively genetically and phenotypically characterized to uncover the genomic regions and key mechanisms associated with the ability of wheat to maintain yield stability under drought conditions. This project will demonstrate how genomic technologies and phenotyping strategies can be brought together and utilised to address important issues in crop stress biology and resource use efficiency.

Prior to joining the Earlham Institute I worked at the UEA on the bioinformatics analysis of next generation sequencing datasets generated from RNA-seq experiments, and am particularly interested in bringing together NGS transcriptomics and genetic analysis to explore the regulatory mechanisms underlying key agronomic traits.

I have a background in crop science, molecular genetics and bioinformatics and have worked with a range of agricultural and horticultural crop species; mapping genes controlling of disease resistance in brassica and apple, dwarfing ability of rootstocks in apple and identifying novel small RNA linked to fruit development in tomato.