Watercress takes the prize
Nikol Voutsina, a second year PhD student in the laboratory of Gail Taylor was awarded the prize for best poster at the recent Genetics Society Annual Meeting, entitled ‘Breeding for beer, bacon and biofuels’ that described the research of her PhD project on watercress.
This crop is a favourite of the group and for good reason – watercress is known to have powerful chemical properties that prevent cancer cell development and is high in anti-oxidants and other chemo-protective chemicals. Nikol is undertaking ground-breaking research to develop the first genomic resources in watercress that will allow future targeted breeding using molecular tools but without the need for a GM crop. She has produced the first genomic information on watercress sequencing 87 million base pairs of DNA and identifying over 40,000 genes including those for high glucosinolate content, which are known pre-cursors of the anti-cancer watercress chemicals. The next step in her research has been to cross high and low glucosinolate lines and produce the first genetic map for this crop.
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Ms Nikol Voutsina BA, MSc
Ms Nikol Voutsina is Postgraduate Research Student in Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton.
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Gail Taylor BSc, PhD, FRSB
Since 2017 Gail Taylor has been employed by and based at The University of California, Davis, where she is Professor and Chair of the Department of Plant Sciences.
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