If you think you’re skilled at multitasking, just try single-handedly caring for more than 500 canola plants at once – each needing to be treated at a specific stage of flowering – in the UWA Shenton Park Field Station screenhouse.

This unenviable challenge was recently accomplished by UWA PhD candidate Xiaojie Hu, who is working under the supervision of Professor Wallace Cowling, Dr Sheng Chen, and Hackett Professor Kadambot Siddique.

Her research is funded by the Grains Research & Development Corporation (GRDC) through the project ‘Improving canola heat tolerance - a coordinated multidisciplinary approach’ and supported by the China Scholarship Council and the UWA International Fee Scholarship.

Image: UWA student Xiaojie Hu among her canola plants at the Shenton Park Field Station.

“The most rewarding aspect of this research experience so far has been the opportunity to enhance my problem-solving skills,” Ms Hu said.

“I was tasked with 20 different genotypes and four sampling timepoints while managing those 500 plants, so I used different coloured pens to mark the plants for each day’s sampling.

“This system has helped me efficiently identify and manage the plants throughout the experiment.”

The ongoing screenhouse experiment at Shenton Park Field Station (which includes two temperature-controlled room to carry out the treatments) is the third experiment of Mr Hu’s postgraduate research.

It aims to identify gene expression patterns under heat stress and discover potential heat-response genes through transcriptomic analysis.

Ms Hu said her research sought to deepen the understanding of how canola plants respond to heat stress and identify key genes or pathways involved in this response.

Climate change, particularly global warming, poses a significant challenge to agriculture.

PhD candidate Xiaojie Hu

“As a cool-season crop, canola is especially vulnerable to heat stress, which is a major factor limiting its yield,” she said. 

"Our findings will be crucial for future breeding efforts aimed at developing heat-tolerant canola cultivars.”

Dr Chen, who leads the GRDC project, said Ms Hu was intelligent, diligent and productive.

“Her PhD research work in RNAseq and proteomics helps the identification of the heat tolerance genes, which is an important part of our GRDC-funded canola heat tolerance project,” he said.

This article was first published in the September 2024 edition of The UWA Institute of Agriculture newsletter. Read the full publication online.