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My work is all about understanding how life works at the chemical level. I spend most of my time working with plants because, as boring as they might seem, they actually do the most interesting chemistry!

To make things easier I grow plant cells in bottles or on agar plates – they’re bright green and I’ve always wondered what they’d taste like…

Sometimes I grow real plants too though – normally a type of weed called arabidopsis. You can find it growing in pavements all over the country, but scientist like to use it because it grows fast, makes loads of seeds and doesn’t take up too much space! These plants actually have glowing fluorescent proteins in them so I can see what they’re doing inside their cells.

I feed them labelled isotopes and then use a machine called a mass spectrometer to measure which compounds take up the isotopes. I then feed all this data into some supercomputers just outside Oxford and wait to see what reactions my plants have been up to…

I use what I’ve measured to see how the plants cope with different stressful situations like floods, droughts or being infected by pathogens. Then I genetically modify the plants so they can cope in future climates and always make enough food for everyone on the planet!

I also think about how we could use plants to make biomaterials to replace our reliance on fossil fuels or even take the chemical pathways out of plants and put them in bacteria to make all sorts of useful things like medicine, pigments and biofuels.

Life isn’t very typical at the moment as I’ve been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Normally I’d get up and head to the plant sciences department in Oxford, it’s a leaky old building that’s falling apart in some places but we still manage to do science there!

I’ll check my plants or cells first thing just to make sure they’re happy, sometimes I have to give them antibiotics if they’re looking sick – just like you or me.

From then on I could be doing all sorts of different things, from reading papers and coming up with new ideas to performing experiments on my plants. I also love just chatting with other scientists to share ideas and solve problems together. My day might also include going to a seminar or talk from a prominent scientist – I’m really lucky that I get to meet lots of interesting people from all over the world who are always happy to answer my questions about their work.