PhD Studentship: Optimising Nitrogen-fixing Potential of British-grown Lentil

Current global food system is unsustainable. Over-reliance on just four crops – rice, wheat, maize, and potato – is driving biodiversity loss and environmental damage. One viable strategy for sustainably achieving food and nutrition security with reduced environmental impact is to diversify food systems by encouraging the use of underutilised crops, particularly pulses like lentils.

Lentils are nutritional powerhouses packed with protein. Lentils, like many legume do not depend on environmentally damaging fertilisers for cultivation. They obtain their “natural fertiliser” through symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing microbes (rhizobia) that are accommodated in their root nodules and leave valuable residual nitrogen for subsequent crops. There is a growing demand for plant-based protein in the UK and there are already successful efforts to produce British-grown lentils to meet local demand. As a novel crop in the UK, it is important to identify compatible rhizobia strains from UK soils that can boost lentil cultivation in the UK.

This exciting PhD project aims to promote lentil cultivation in the UK by optimizing this natural legume-rhizobia partnership. The project will involve:

• Screening lentil diversity: You will explore a rich collection of lentil varieties from around the world to identify those with high nodulation potential in UK soils.
• Isolating and sequencing lentil-nodulating rhizobia. You will combine microbiology, Nanopore sequencing and bioinformatics techniques to identify and develop a biobank of rhizobia strains in UK soils that can nodulate lentil.
• Creating the perfect match: You will combine synthetic biology and next-generation sequencing techniques to identify the most competitive rhizobia strains with high-nitrogen-fixing ability.

This project is at the nexus of plant and microbe interaction. It therefore will combine techniques from different disciplines including plant biology, microbiology, synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics.

Funding notes:

This is a competitive fully-funded studentship from the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership (MIBTP) supported by BBSRC. If successful, the studentship will start in October 2025. International students are also encouraged to apply.

Prior to application, interested applicants are encouraged to contact Dr Oluwaseyi Shorinola (o.shorinola@bham.ac.uk) to discuss the project and the application process.

To apply, visit the MIBTP page (Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership - University of Birmingham), expand the list of studentship projects available under “Biosciences (standard projects)”, and apply for this project using the application link next to the project title (“Optimising nitrogen-fixing potential of British-grown lentil”).

References:

• Mendoza-Suárez, Marcela A., et al. "Optimizing Rhizobium-legume symbioses by simultaneous measurement of rhizobial competitiveness and N2 fixation in nodules." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.18 (2020): 9822-9831.
• Rajendran K, Coyne CJ, Zheng P, et al. Genetic diversity and GWAS of agronomic traits using an ICARDA lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) Reference Plus collection. Plant Genetic Resources: Characterization and Utilization. 2021;19(4):279-288. doi:10.1017/S147926212100006X

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