Crop Nutritional Quality
The Crop Nutrition Quality group aims to make legumes more versatile and valuable, both nutritionally and economically, by enhancing desirable traits and reducing those that are less favourable. To achieve this, the group focuses on improving nutritional content, sensory appeal, and culinary qualities while minimising antinutrients and other defects by exploring the genetic basis of these traits.
Traditionally, breeding programmes have prioritised agronomic performance traits like yield and disease resistance, while often overlooking quality traits that directly impact both farmers and consumers. This lack of focus on quality traits has become a major barrier to the adoption of new legume cultivars, especially in low-income regions where farmers are not only the main producers but also the primary consumers of these crops. In these communities, improving both agronomic and quality traits simultaneously is essential for encouraging the uptake of new varieties and enhancing food security and climate resilience.
Research areas
.
About the group leader
I completed my PhD at the University of Reading in Professor Donal O’Sullivan’s lab, where I worked on characterising faba bean seed protein composition and mapping its underlying genetics. I then joined John Innes Centre in Norwich as a postdoctoral researcher to work on the genetics of pea nutritional quality in the labs of Professor Janneke Balk and Professor Claire Domoney. My current research at Crop Science Centre aims to enhance the nutritional and culinary quality of legumes and other underutilised food crops by discovering the underlying genetic mechanisms.
Other research groups
