Claudia Harflett

Claudia has a longstanding, broad interest and knowledge in botany, metabolomics, ecology and soil science. She has been involved in the institute’s cropping carbon research, which aims to maximise carbon harvest from perennial crops, such as short rotation coppice (SRC) willow and Miscanthus. Claudia's key research interests and expertise include SRC willow phenology, morphology and their metabolomic differences between species and lines. She has also worked with transformed tissue cultures of poplar and willow, and with other energy and forage crops. Claudia's PhD thesis investigated zinc accumulation and its effects on herbivory and competitive ability in metallicolous populations of rumex acetosa L. Claudia has four key skills: 1) phenology, morphology and growth of SRC willow varieties under controlled environment and field conditions; 2) hydroponic growth of willows and compound feeding; 3) high-throughput metabolomic sample processing and extraction techniques for NMR, DI-ESI-MS, HPLC and LC/MS; 4) application of this knowledge and techniques to a variety of plant tissue types, such as woody biomass, roots, catkins, residues and growth media. Claudia's latest research was on the time course analysis of the metabolomic profile of several Salix species from budburst, which included chemical feeding studies.