Floren Villanueva Scrafton (she/her)
Flo was a PhD student on the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP who joined Gail’s group to investigate the ‘crosstalk’ between salt-tolerance mechanisms and immunity in plants. To do this she used the Andean halophytic crop species Chenopodium quinoa, a highly nutritious pseudocereal most closely related to spinach and sugar beet. Quinoa plants (cultivar ATLAS) were grown in salt-spiked hydroponics and sequentially challenged by infecting with pathovars of the model pathogen Pseudomonas syringae or with artificial immune elicitors. We call this ‘The halophytic pathosystem’ and we have used it to capture interesting differentials between disease susceptibility and growth under highly saline conditions. She used a combination of biochemical, microscopic and macroscopic phenotyping techniques to grow our understanding of quinoa’s immune system and to explore novel aspects of its halophytic phenotype. From this our fundamental goal was to elucidate points of crosstalk between abiotic and biotic stress tolerance mechanisms of plants. We collaborated with The British Quinoa Company and the Bolivian National Institute of Agriculture and Forestry (INIAF) to address applied goals in quinoa, these include: the identification of field-based biotic challenges to British-grown quinoa and the characterisation of the combinatorial stress tolerances of native Bolivian varieties using our experimental system.
Outside of science Flo's passions are sport, music and travelling. Alongside my PhD she trained competitively for athletics and multisport events with the long-term ambition to represent GB or Bolivia.
Since leaving Oxford she has continued to train part-time as an aspiring professional road cyclist. She is the current double Bolivian National Cycling Champion and was the 4th fastest female Latin American cyclist at last year's World Championships. Her goals are to boost the participation of Bolivian cyclists in Europe, represent Bolivia at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and be racing at the highest level in the Women’s World Tour in the near future.
