Mark Wilkinson

Mark's research interest has focused on several aspects of wheat grain development, including grain quality and cell wall composition for dietary fibre. In his recent project, he has generated an array of transgenic wheat lines with altered phenotypes and he has been involved in the successful identification of key enzymes, arabinoxylans (AX), involved in cell wall biosynthesis in wheat endosperm, an important source of dietary fibre. The main aim of his current work is to study the biosynthesis of AX in the developing wheat grain. This work has a huge impact on the viscosity of the flour and on its end-use processing, whether for high fibre products (high viscosity flour) or for animal feed and biofuel production (low viscosity flour). He has been involved in many gene studies looking at the role of puroindoline genes (wheat grain hardness) and genes involved in arabinogalactan biosynthesis, which may have application in human health, for example, prebiotics. Mark has 20 years' experience in plant tissue culture with Solanaceous species, wheat, and Brassica. He has a wide range of molecular biology skills, including DNA and RNA extraction techniques, PCR, cDNA synthesis, RTPCR, qPCR, Southern, Northern analysis, microbiological techniques, cloning and generation of transformation vectors.