Exciting PhD Opportunity: Finding the missing links in salt and water transport in plants

The PhD Scholarship “Finding the missing links in salt and water transport in plants” is fully funded by the University of Adelaide to support a full-time PhD student who is commencing research in the field of Plant Biology. The successful candidate will be working within a team funded by an Australian Research Council grant to Emeritus Professor Steve Tyerman and Dr Megan Shelden, and includes support from a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

The project aims to reveal the molecular pathways that regulate water and ion transport via aquaporins using advanced techniques in biophysics and molecular biology. These results will provide novel insights into how plants coordinate and adapt to changing water and salt conditions, addressing a missing link in how ions and water move in and out of plant vacuoles. Benefits include an expanded, innovative range of targets for plant breeding programs to improve plant productivity in our changing climate.

The PhD student will primarily be responsible for surveying Arabidopsis, barley and/or grapevine aquaporins for ion conducting phenotypes, generating site-directed mutants of these genes of interest and potentially generating and phenotyping plant mutants. The PhD project will integrate components of physiology and molecular biology to understand salt and water movement across cellular membranes. They will join the team of researchers involved in this project and will be expected to collaborate with colleagues at the University of Adelaide.

Expressions of interest should be submitted to Dr Megan Shelden via email with the name of scholarship in the subject heading. Further enquiries can go to Dr Shelden as well, or for more information on eligibility and PhD stipends, have a look on the University of Adelaide PhD Scholarship website.