Mustafa Emre Gül

Wheat is a major staple crop and an important part of human nutrition. As demand grows for more resilient and sustainable varieties, there is a clear need to improve wheat yield and yield stability. Hybrid wheat has strong potential to increase both, but successful hybrid breeding requires additional genetic variation across key traits, including plant height.

In his PhD, Emre will be working on how single-copy genes can be used to generate novel variation for plant height in hybrid wheat. He will investigate how Rht13 reduces plant height and identify new height genes that can be used in breeding. He will also build a bioinformatic pipeline to find other single-copy genes that are likely to affect height and characterise them in more detail. This is an NRPDTP CASE project, carried out in collaboration with KWS UK Ltd, RAGT Seeds Ltd, and Limagrain UK Ltd.

Prior to his PhD, Emre graduated from Akdeniz University, Turkiye in Agricultural Biotechnology as the top-ranking student in the Faculty of Agriculture. He then completed a fully funded MSc in Plant Genetics, Genomics and Breeding at CIHEAM Zaragoza, co-organised with the University of Lleida, Spain.

Alongside his studies, he has been active in the wider seed and agriculture community through his voluntary work with IAAS (International Association of Students in Agricultural and Related Sciences), his role as an NGIN Youth Ambassador, and as a board member of YoungGPZ, the early-career branch of the German Society for Plant Breeding. He was also recognised by Seed World Europe as one of the 20 Most Promising Young Plant Breeders in Europe.