Research
Discovery-oriented:
📚 Leveraging plant natural variation in response to environmental stresses to understand their physiological, molecular and metabolic responses, constraints, adaptive strategies, potential and limits.
📚 Exploring how environmental stresses –such as temperature, drought, and nutrient conditions–affect crop performance (yield) and the nutritional quality of food (minerals, proteins, bioactive, etc.) in outdoor and controlled farming systems.
✔ Crop-agnostic for research but biased towards 🌿grain legumes/pulses🫛🫘
Translational:
🎯 Improve morpho-physiological and agronomic traits for enhanced productivity, as well as nutraceutical traits for human, feed, and industrial applications — leveraging precision farming and biotechnology (gene editing 🧬).
Current Projects:
- 2026-2030 “Progressive Solutions for European Feed Autonomy through Sustainable Plant Protein Value Chains – ProFEED“. Hutton Lead (PI) and Work Package Lead: “Advancing Resilience and Yield in Strategic EU Protein Crops”. £395k. Horizon Europe/UKRI.
- 2026 “Dissecting Drought-Driven Responses in Faba Bean: Physiology, Phenotypes and Protein – Faba3P“. PI, Hutton APGC Seedcorn. Access to APGC’s high-throughput phenotyping facilities.
- 2024-2027 “Light Pulsing in Vertical Farming For Sustainable Fresh Produce – LightPuls-VF”. Co-Investigator, £582k. BBSRC/Innovate UK/Industrial Partner – Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd.
- 2024-2027 “Exploiting Controlled Environments for the Development of Optimised Cannabis Sativa Phenotypes for Pharmaceutical Applications – CE-CannPharm”. Co-Investigator, £664k. BBSRC/Innovate UK/Industrial Partner – GlassPharms Ltd.
- 2024-2027 “Optimising Genetics by Management (GxM) Interactions to Enhance Productivity and Quality in Indoor Lettuce Cultivation – GxM-Lettuce”. Researcher. BBSRC/Innovate UK/Industrial Partners – Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd and Tozer Seeds Ltd.
- 2024-2029 “National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre – NAPIC“. Researcher Co-Investigator. BBSRC/Innovate UK/Industry/Stakeholders.
Past research
- 2023-2024 “Machine learning for identifying leaf reflectance proxies for rapidly deriving crop photosynthetic parameters – MLSynth”. PI, £20k Hutton Seedcorn Proof of Concept.
- 2021-2023 “Upscaling adoption and exploitation of a wide diversity of Iron and Zinc-rich beans by rural populations in Africa – ZIRON Pulse“. Researcher. BBSRC/Innovate UK
Publications
The following Publications have not yet been migrated to the James Hutton Institute's Pure service and relate to the research outputs from the two legacy organisations: The Macaulay Land Use Research Institute and The Scottish Crop Research Institute.
Journals
Prior to appointment
- Rodriguez-Rosales, M.P.; Galvez, F.J.; Huertas, R.; Aranda, M.N.; Baghour, M.; Cagnac, O.; Venema, K. (2009) Plant NHX cation/proton antiporters, Plant signaling, 4(4), 265-276
