Systems Biology of Plant Disease Resistance

Welcome to the Denby Lab. We are interested in plant disease resistance and using systems and synthetic biology approaches to unravel how plants respond to pathogen infection, the regulatory networks underlying the defence response, and novel bio-control strategies. We also use systems biology and genomic/transcriptomics to enhance breeding of key traits in leafy vegetable crops – for the UK and for smallholder farmers in the Global South.

Lab members have biological and/or computational backgrounds and work together to solve key questions on how plants respond to changing environmental conditions, and how we can breed or engineer improved varieties of leafy vegetables – whether to enhance disease resistance, nutritional content, yield under low input agricultural systems, or adapt varieties for controlled environment agriculture. We also research how vertical farming can play a positive role in urban food systems with our vertical farm Grow It York.

We are located at the University of York in the Department of Biology within the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP).

Come and join us!

We are currently recruiting for a fully-funded PhD research project in collaboration with Nicola Patron at the Earlham Institute. If you are interested in plant immunity, gene regulation, how gene regulatory networks control plant phenotypes and synthetic biology then this is the project for you! The successful researcher will be based at York but spend time with the Patron group and will use a range of molecular biology techniques (including gene editing and high-throughput protoplast assays) to investigate the lettuce immunity gene network and re-engineer the network to enhance disease resistance.