Graduate Centre for International Agriculture
We are working in partnership with Rothamsted Research to build research capacity in the field of international agriculture. The Graduate Centre for International Agriculture supports doctoral training in agriculture and biosciences.
Join our world-leading researchers
Studentships
We would like to invite applications for the project listed below.
Eash studentship will receive a stipend (benchmarked to UK BBSRC stipend rates, approximately £15000/year), tuition fees paid and an annual consumables budget of £5000. Please send any question to the lead supervisor for each project. To be considered, please submit a CV and covering letter to Dr Gabriel Castrillo.
Latin America is the epicentre of a new cacao revolution that tries to reduce the amount of cadmium, a toxic heavy metal, from cacao beans. Different strategies have been designed to minimise the content of cadmium but none includes the analysis of the contribution of the soil microbiota in cadmium uptake and accumulation across the different plant organs. In this exciting project we will characterise the microbial diversity in Theobroma cacao, with special attention to the cacao fruit to design combinations of microbes that help us reduce the accumulation of cadmium in the beans.
This project represents a unique opportunity for a PhD student to develop desirable skills ranging from microbiology, bioinformatics, metabolomic, transcriptomic to heavy metal uptake. The student will learn how to isolate and maintain bacterial strains collections, how to characterise complex plant microbiomes and how to obtain and to interpret transcriptomics, ionomics, and metabolomics data. The analysis of the data will require the acquisition of bioinformatics skills like mathematical modelling and coding. All this will be done a multidisciplinary, international, and collaborative environment.
Please contact Dr Gabriel Castrillo for more information.