Course summary

Our PhD/MPhil Plant Science programme enables you to undertake a research project that will improve understanding of Plant Science. Food security and a healthy diet within the context of a growing global population and climate change has become major challenges of our time, particularly if this is coupled with the need to find more sustainable and renewable sources of biofuels and chemicals. Research in Manchester addresses both these issues, firstly by engineering plant development to generate plants that have a higher yield, improved nutrition and are also more resistant to external stress and, secondly, by exploiting plants and microalgae to generate renewable and sustainable biofuels, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Well-characterised model plants such as Arabidopsis, as well as crops and natural species, are used in interdisciplinary approaches that entail interactions between groups across the University. A range of funding agencies, as well as industrial sponsors, support our research projects. After graduation, our students go on to have successful careers in plant sciences, industry or academia. Three major themes run through our plant sciences research:

• Manipulating plant development to increase yield and stress resilience;

• Biochemistry and genetics of plastids and their use as cell factories;

• Optimising plant defence at the cellular level.