UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Department of Plant Sciences – 2013/2014
Research Topics and Supervisors willing to supervise Chemistry
Part II students.

Professor R.G. Ratcliffe (Plant Sciences)
george.ratcliffe@plants.ox.ac.uk

Development of new NMR methods with applications in plant biology, including steady state, stable isotope labelling experiments for metabolic flux analysis, and protocols for testing metabolic hypotheses in isolated plant mitochondria. An interesting project for a Part II chemist would be to develop a combined 13C and 31P NMR approach for the analysis of mitochondrial metabolism at reduced oxygen concentrations.

T.C.R. Williams, M.G. Poolman, A.J.M. Howden, M. Schwarzlander, D.A. Fell, R.G. Ratcliffe and L.J. Sweetlove (2010) A genome-scale metabolic model accurately predicts fluxes in central carbon metabolism under stress conditions. Plant Physiology 154: 311-323.

N.J. Kruger, S.K. Masakapalli and R.G. Ratcliffe (2012) Strategies for investigating the plant metabolic network with steady-state metabolic flux analysis: lessons from an Arabidopsis cell culture and other systems. J. Experimental Botany 63: 2309-2323.

M. Wirtz, K.F.M. Beard, C.P. Lee, A. Boltz, M. Schwarzlander, C. Fuchs, A.J. Meyer, C. Heeg, L.J. Sweetlove, R.G. Ratcliffe and R. Hell (2012) Mitochondrial cysteine synthase complex regulates O-acetylserine biosynthesis in plants. J. Biological Chemistry 287: 27941-27947.