You work on lots of research projects, what is the overarching theme that ties everything together?
Food security, having enough available, sustainable nutrition to feed people. It all comes back to protecting plants from diseases, making them more climate resilient, or making them have less impact on the environment.
How do you make crops more resilient?
I have worked a lot over the years on research to protect cereals – grain crops such as wheat, barley and oats – from micro-organisms that attack the plants. One way is to look for protective genes in ancient and wild varieties of the crops, which have more genetic diversity. They can tell us about protective genes that could be bred into the widely farmed crops.
What do you find rewarding about that work?
People have often focused on genes that have a large effect on disease. But the microbe that causes the disease can often figure out a way to get around these big shiny genes, so the resilience doesn’t always last long. Instead we looked for genes with little effects, little and many. It has been rewarding to identify those, and we showed that some of the quickly evolving genes in the background were less easy for microbes to circumvent.
And what about non-genetic approaches to help plants be more resilient?
The plant microbiome is very important in maintaining plant health. So we also look at how microbes, mostly fungi, can create a protective environment for the plants. We basically use ‘good’ fungi to boost plant health and protect crops from ‘bad’ microbes. We introduce these good fungi to the plant, sometimes at the seed stage, and they might help the plant cope with drought better or use nutrients more effectively.
What concerns you at the moment about food security in Ireland?
In Ireland we have become quite dependent on importing fruits and vegetables from regions that are now suffering with drought. We need to do more for horticulture in Ireland so we can produce more. Also I’ve been very active in building networks around Ireland and beyond for food integrity, looking at where food comes from and how it can be protected. That’s very important.
You commute from Donegal to Dublin, how does that work for you?
We live near the airport in Donegal, so I fly to Dublin, stay a couple of days and then I fly home. I’ve been doing that since the kids were small, and it works well. I love Donegal, and I have projects here on crops that could be grown sustainably on more marginalised land, and on using fungi to digest the waste from grain crops to produce a protein-rich food source.
If you had unlimited research funding for anything, what would you explore?
If I won the Lotto in the morning I would go off and research whether plants with a small bit of disease are actually good for us humans. Plants that are bred for resistance may lose a bit of their nutritional composition. Also when a plant is under threat it switches on the antioxidant systems that can be good for us.
So there is probably a balance to be had, with a small amount of disease in the mix. I’d love to research that. In the meantime I am the one in the shop going for the scruffy, scabby apples rather than the perfect-looking ones.
And how do you take a break from work?
I spend time in my garden, I grow vegetables in polytunnels. And I love walking, I live at the base of Errigal. It is a beautiful part of the world to walk.
