Bio
Brian R. Murphy is a Research Fellow at the Botany Department, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. He holds a BA(Hons) and PhD in Botany from Trinity College Dublin, and is a Registered Scientist (RSci), Member of the Royal Society of Biology (MRSB), and Member of the Institute of Biology of Ireland (M.I.Biol.I.). His research focuses on fungal endophytes, particularly their role in improving plant stress tolerance and agronomic traits in barley and its crop wild relatives. He has authored several papers, including 'The Difference between Life and Death: Fungal Endophytes Improve Survival and Increase Biomass in Multiply-Stressed Barley' and 'Endophytes from the Crop Wild Relative Hordeum Secalinum L. Improve Agronomic Traits in Unstressed and Salt-Stressed Barley'. With an h-index of 100 and over 36,000 citations, his work has had significant impact in the field of plant–microbe interactions.
Educational Journey
Trinity College Dublin School of Natural Science
B.A. Hons, PhD Botany in Botany • Botany
2012Trinity College Dublin
BA(Hons), PhD, RSci, MRSB, M.I.Biol.I. • Botany
Experience
Research Fellow
2015 - Present • BotanyResearch
The Difference between Life and Death: Fungal Endophytes Improve Survival and Increase Biomass in Multiply-Stressed Barley
Sustainable farming systems are required to allow crops to better cope with the simultaneous multiple stresses that they grow under or are likely to be exposed to under future climate change. Fungal endophytes could form part of the solution. They have been shown to improve important agronomic traits under a single stress, but few studies have investigated the impact of endophytes on growth or disease resistance when exposed to multiple stresses. We compared the performance of the barley cultivar Propino when inoculated with five fungal root endophytes, either individually or combined, derived from wall barley (Hordeum murinum) and grown in optimal conditions (OC) and under a combined drought, heat, nutrient and pathogen stress (MS). We found a greater endophyte-induced improvement in important agronomic traits in the MS plants compared with the OC plants. For the MS plants only 13% of the controls survived to the end of the experiment compared with 80% of the endophyte treatments.
