Apply Here or via the button below - closing date Tuesday 16th June 2026, 12:00 midday

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Open to: UK students only, with at least a 2:2 undergraduate degree (and/or equivalent experience) in Biology or a relevant subject area, and with widening access eligibility.

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What do we want and what will you do?

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We are seeking an enthusiastic and motivated graduate to join a cutting-edge research group in the Department of Biology at University of York. The world faces many critical challenges, from the climate emergency to food security. Experimental genomics and functional investigations in plant science is at the forefront of addressing some of these issues. Sugar beet is a high commodity crop grown around the world, which provides a substantial contribution to sugar production. Thus, understanding how to engineer this crop to maximise production in a sustainable way is agriculturally important.

Sugar beet breeding moves at the speed of flowering. When late or biennial (every two years) flowering occurs, or flowering fails in accelerated conditions, this slows breeding potential and the genetic resource of seed (germplasm) becomes harder to use. Improving flowering reliability under controlled environments would therefore help breeders generate seed faster, recycle parents more efficiently, and test new combinations more quickly. 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. The aim is to identify treatments that make flowering earlier and more reliable across contrasting genotypes. Plants will be compared under baseline and treatment conditions, with readouts including bolting time, floral transition, flowering frequency, plant vigour, and seed set. The outcome will be a practical framework showing which interventions are most promising for difficult material.

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Your MRes community

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Seth trained in plant molecular genetics and circadian biology, with a long standing interest in how plants use light, temperature and daylength information to time development. His research has used Arabidopsis and crop systems to understand how the plant circadian clock controls seasonal responses, flowering, growth and stress adaptation. A central aim of his lab is to move between fundamental mechanisms and crop relevant questions, asking how genes that control environmental timing can be used to improve resilience, adaptation and breeding efficiency.

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James has worked closely with Seth on the nuclear and subnuclear regulation of light and circadian signalling in plants, including how photoreceptor and clock pathways interact to control plant development. His expertise brings strong molecular, genetic and cell biological insight into how plants interpret environmental information. Together, Seth and James are interested in how environmental signals can be used more predictably to control developmental transitions, including flowering, in agriculturally important species.

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In this MRes project, you will join a research environment focused on plant seasonality, flowering time, environmental signalling and crop improvement. The project is designed around a practical breeding problem in sugar beet: how to make flowering more reliable in lines that are late flowering or difficult to flower under accelerated conditions. You will work with controlled environment experiments and targeted treatments that may include light quality, photoperiod, temperature pre-treatments and selected flowering related growth regulators. The aim is to identify interventions that improve bolting, floral transition, flowering frequency and seed set across contrasting sugar beet genotypes.

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You will be supported by Seth and James, and will work within a wider plant science community in the Department of Biology at the University of York. As an MRes student, you will receive close supervisory support, regular project meetings and guidance in experimental design, data interpretation and scientific writing. You will also be part of an active research environment that includes PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, technical specialists and academic staff working across plant biology, genetics, crop science, environmental responses and biotechnology. This includes links to York's Plant Chronobiology Hub, which brings together researchers interested in how biological timing, environmental cycles and plant development interact, providing an additional intellectual community around the project.   As a student at the University of York you will also be supported with a Thesis Advisory Panel to keep you on track with data generation, research questions, and thesis writing. You will be part of an active community of >100 PhD students in the Biology Department, >120 postdoctoral scientists, and around 30 highly skilled technical staff.

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A focus on technical skill development

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This project offers hands-on training in controlled environment plant growth, crop physiology, flowering time analysis, phenotyping, experimental design and quantitative data analysis. You will learn how to plan and run treatment experiments, score developmental transitions, measure plant vigour and flowering traits, and interpret genotype by environment responses.

When you first begin in Seth and James' team, you will be supported with relevant research papers, background reading and access to appropriate training opportunities so that you can develop both the theoretical and practical understanding needed for the project. You will also have opportunities to work with experienced staff in the Department of Biology and its Technology Facilities, gaining practical exposure to controlled environment growth, plant phenotyping and, where appropriate, basic molecular or analytical approaches.

The project is well suited to a student who wants to develop strong experimental skills in plant science while working on a problem with clear relevance to crop breeding and food security. By the end of the studentship, you should have gained experience in independent research planning, plant developmental analysis, data handling, scientific communication and the translation of fundamental plant biology into a practical crop improvement context.

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