Ruth Hamilton
01382562049
James Hutton Institute
Errol Road
Dundee
Scotland
DD2 5DA
Biography
Ruth is a barley geneticist with the International Barley Hub based at the James Hutton Institute. Ruth is interested in improving the long-term sustainability of barley. Her current work focuses on developing barley material with improved genetic diversity.
She is working on the R-evolve project (funded by UKRI and linking into the RESAS programme), that aims to rapidly re-domesticate wild barley. The R-evolve project takes a novel approach to improving barley genetic diversity. Instead of transferring exotic genes into an elite genetic background, this project does the opposite, transferring the key domestication genes from the elite into a wild background. This rapidly increases the available genetic diversity by replicating the domestication process. The populations that have been developed also underpin part of a large EU Horizons project Cousin (Cousin Project | Crop Cousins, promise for the future) which is investigating the value of crop wild relatives and future breeding of sustainable climate resilient crops.