Floren Villanueva Scrafton (she/her)

I'm a third year PhD student on the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP and I joined Gail’s group to investigate the ‘crosstalk’ between salt-tolerance mechanisms and immunity in plants. To do this I use the Andean halophytic crop species Chenopodium quinoa, a highly nutritious pseudocereal most closely related to spinach and sugar beet. Quinoa plants (cultivar ATLAS) are 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. I use 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 is to elucidate points of crosstalk between abiotic and biotic stress tolerance mechanisms of plants. Lastly, we collaborate with The British Quinoa Company and the Bolivian National Institute of Agriculture and Forestry (INIAF) to develop 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 my passions are sport, music and travelling. Alongside my PhD I train competitively for athletics and multisport events with the long-term ambition to represent GB or Bolivia! If you have any questions about my work or are keen to collaborate please get in touch via email: floren.scrafton@plants.ox.ac.uk or connect with me via Twitter @FlorenVScrafton.