PhD Studentship: Engineering Fitness in Disease-Resistant Crops

Engineering crop disease resistance to overcome the growth-defence trade-off

Developing crops that are both productive and resillient is one of the major challenges facing agriculture. While disease-resistance genes can protect plants from devastating pathogens, they often come with a hidden cost: reduced growth and lower yields. This PhD will investigate whether engineering biology can overcome this trade-off by precisely controlling when and where resistance genes are expressed.

You will study resistance to potato cyst nematodes, one of the UK's most important pests. A resistance locus from soybean, Rhg1, can protect against these nematodes, but continuous expression also reduces root growth and tuber yield.

We hypothesise that these impacts result from uncontrolled expression in the wrong tissues or at the wrong time, and that programmable expression could maintain resistance while avoiding these growth and yield costs.

Using world-class automation robotics in the Earlham Biofoundry, you will build and test a regulatory-part library, before applying these tools to redesign Rhg1 constructs and evaluate engineered plants for disease resistance, root architecture and tuber yield.

This highly collaborative PhD brings together engineering biology and laboratory automation expertise from the Grandellis Group at Earlham Institute, with the Witek Group at 2Blades - internationally recognised for research into genetic resistance to crop diseases.

Throughout the project, you will gain training in plant molecular biology, synthetic and engineering biology, automated DNA assembly, Biofoundry technologies, and genetic engineering These highly transferable skills are increasingly sought after in both academic research and the biotechnology sector.

The project will be conducted at the Earlham Institute, a world-class BBSRC research centre of excellence in genomics, engineering and computational biology, and AI. You will join a highly collaborative and supportive research community and have access to training and career development opportunities across the Norwich Research Park through the Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership.

This project is awarded with a 4-year Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership PhD DTP studentship. The studentship includes payment of tuition fees (directly to the University), a stipend to cover living expenses (2026/27 stipend rate: £21,805, and a Research Training Support Grant of £5,000pa for each year of the studentship.