Our teams

Plant Health Discovery for a Sustainable Future

The Sainsbury Laboratory is committed to the highest standard of fundamental and applied scientific research into molecular plant-microbe interactions.

Research topics at The Sainsbury Laboratory include

  • plant disease resistance genes
  • the biology of pathogen effector proteins
  • innate immune recognition in plants
  • signalling and cellular changes during plant-microbe interactions
  • plant and pathogen genomics
  • and biotechnological approaches to crop disease resistance.

Each of our scientific groups have projects that take fundamental scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the field with the aim of reducing worldwide losses to crop diseases. Current projects include the discovery, engineering and deployment of novel immune receptors in crops, as well as genome editing tools that will enable the generation of novel alleles for crop improvement.