What Makes Weeds Flower?

Our CASE-supported PhD project offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to sustainable agriculture by gathering and generating data about how to disrupt seed production in herbicide-resistant weeds. These findings will be applied to develop rapid and effective strategies to control unmanageable seed-dispersed weed populations.  

Chemical herbicides have historically driven agricultural productivity, but their widespread use has led to the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds. These weeds survive herbicide treatments, proliferate, and cause unsustainable yield losses and increased agricultural costs. To regain control, we urgently need new effective and sustainable strategies. The long-term goal of our innovative project is to prevent seeds of annual, herbicide-resistant weeds from entering the seed bank. To accomplish this, we must first uncover what makes weeds flower – we are looking for someone to take on this task.  

The project will focus on the most problematic grass weeds, such as blackgrass, ryegrass, foxtails, and crabgrass. In agricultural fields, these unruly species are prolific seed producers with transient soil seed banks that cause significant damage. However, we have brought these weeds into our laboratory and developed them into experimentally amenable “model weeds”, complete with chromosome-scale genomes, transcriptomes, and methods for transiently altering gene expression. This PhD will use these resources alongside in-project generated data to identify genes that promote flowering and to determine whether altering them delays, inhibits, or modifies seed production. We hypothesise that in weeds, as in other grasses, changing from producing leaves to producing flowers is promoted by environmental factors, like increases in day length and/or temperature. Therefore, the project will also test whether, and then understand how, these environmental cues promote flowering in these species. In sum, you will not only identify and functionally validate genes involved in promoting environmentally responsive flowering in problematic weed species, but you will also assess potential targets for future weed management interventions. 

This multidisciplinary project will be supported by experts from Rothamsted Research, the University of Bath, and Syngenta. While you generate and quantify empirical data with us and our teams, you will gain hands-on experience in plant biology, molecular biology, and functional genetics as well as learn bioinformatics and statistical skills. Appropriate training will be offered. We are looking for someone with an interest in plant or weed science and bioinformatics or genomics who is excited to use a wide range of computational and laboratory/glasshouse techniques. For informal queries, please contact dana.macgregor@rothamsted.ac.uk 

Our aim as the SWBio DTP is to support students from a range of backgrounds and circumstances. Where needed, we will work with you to take into consideration reasonable project adaptations (for example to support caring responsibilities, disabilities, other significant personal circumstances) as well as flexible working and part-time study requests, to enable greater access to a PhD.  All our supervisors support us with this aim, so please feel comfortable in discussing further with the listed PhD project supervisor to see what is feasible.