Dr. Beckles is a plant biologist who focuses on maximizing the quality and quantity of food crops.

Dr. Beckles is originally from Barbados, but received much of her education in the UK, earning her Ph.D. in Plant Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1999. She has worked at UC Davis since 2003. Her research has focused specifically on how plants make and store starch.

Plants store energy generated through photosynthesis as starch, and humans depend on plants as our source of starch-based energy. (Starch makes up close to half the calories we consume and we are not able to make our own.) One major project in Dr. Beckles’ lab is to better understand how plants build and break down starches, with the goal of being able to make starch in the lab — with tight control over the fine details of the synthetic starch. Such synthetic products could be useful both as food/nutrition and as a biodegradable building material.

Another major goal of Dr. Beckles’ lab is to understand the molecular pathways that determine the amount of sugars in fruits and grains at the point that they’re being eaten as food. Part of this project is better understanding what the trade-offs are: for example, increasing sugar production in tomatoes reduces their ability to survive before harvest, while starch content in wheat grains seems to necessarily mean losing protein. Without understanding what these compromises are and why they exist, we won’t be able to engineer more nutritious food, which is important for feeding the growing global population. A second part of this project involves looking at different storage conditions post-harvest and trying to hash out what the effects are on produce. After all, it doesn’t help feed the world to “build” the perfect food crop if it rots or tastes bad by the time a consumer goes to eat it.