Funded Biology Masters by Research: Investigating environmental factors to influence flowering in sugar beet (Generation Research)

About the Project

Lead supervisor: Prof Seth Davis

Co-supervisors: Dr James Ronald

We are seeking an enthusiastic and motivated graduate to join a cutting-edge research group in the Department of Biology at University of York. Sugar beet is a high commodity crop grown around the world, which provides a substantial contribution to sugar production. This project will ask whether late and non-flowering sugar beet lines can be induced to flower under speed-breeding conditions using a focused set of environmental and chemical treatments. These may include altered light quality, modified photoperiod, temperature pre-treatments, and selected flowering-related growth regulators, tested alone and in combination.

Plants will be compared under baseline and treatment conditions, with readouts including bolting time, floral transition, flowering frequency, plant vigour, and seed set.

Your MRes community

This MRes project, you will join a research environment focused on plant seasonality, flowering time, environmental signalling and crop improvement.

A focus on technical skill development

This project offers hands-on training in controlled environment plant growth, crop physiology, flowering time analysis, phenotyping, experimental design and quantitative data analysis.