Dr Pallavi Singh - University of Essex

Dr Pallavi Singh 

Let the "Hard Graft" begin: Understanding and enhancing water use efficiency in crops

Water use efficiency (WUE), the ability of plants to balance carbon gain with water demand is central to meeting the challenges of producing more food with fewer resources. The overarching focus of our research group is to understand the fundamental biological processes that underpin WUE and to translate these insights into strategies for resilient crop improvement. A key focus of our work is grafting: the physical joining of different plant tissues to combine beneficial traits. While grafting has been widely exploited in horticultural crops, its potential in major cereals has remained largely untapped. By pioneering grafting in cereals, including rice and pearl millet, we are uncovering novel root–shoot signalling mechanisms that regulate water transport and photosynthetic performance. This approach provides a powerful platform to dissect the physiological and genetic controls of WUE while creating new opportunities to engineer climate-smart crops. In this talk, I will highlight how we are integrating physiology, genomics, and synthetic biology to harness grafting as a transformative tool for sustainable crop productivity.