Q&A with Dr Nadia Mohd-Radzman

A postdoctoral researcher at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University (SLCU), King’s E-Lab Research Associate Nadia Mohd-Radzman wants us all to be much more aware of the potential of amazing legumes.

You’ve been called a ‘botanist on a mission’ and your campaign to boost the British broad bean has really caught the media’s attention in recent months. What are you hoping to achieve?

I’m passionate about improving food security and obsessed with the potential of legume crops! The broad bean has been grown in Britain for hundreds of years and used to be a big part of our food culture, but has largely been forgotten about. It has so many health benefits – from chemicals that can help with our mental health to the high levels it contains of the ingredient levodopa, or L-dopa, which is used in the clinical treatment of people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. I want to persuade people to eat more! I’m launching a website shortly, Broad’n Mind (broadnmind. com), which will have recipes and resources.

But more broadly, legumes have a vital part to play in addressing the big questions around how we produce enough food for a growing global population without destroying the planet. Current food production traditionally uses large amounts of nitrogen fertilisers, which are not sustainable and have caused adverse environmental effects. Legumes work with microbes in the soil to take nitrogen from the air – ‘fixing’ – and create their own fertilisers. By growing more, we can reduce our nitrogen fertiliser use. It can be hugely important, especially for food producers in the Global South.

You recently founded a start-up to develop new technology to accelerate genetic improvements in challenging crops such as legumes. Has being part of the King’s E-Lab helped with this?

It’s playing a big part in how I build this venture. Climate change means we need to be able to improve our crops faster and cheaper. To do that, we’ll need new technologies. Current technology has at least two bottlenecks that need to be addressed – it is slow and does not work for all plants. Using plant peptides as versatile molecules, we can release these bottlenecks and provide a better method to improve our crop plants. My start-up is a plant peptide company developing innovative bioswitches for controlling plant growth. I’m currently focused on two complementary peptide-based technologies – a peptide bioherbicide with a non-toxic mode of action, and a gene-editing platform to accelerate breeding in any crop species. When combined, I can use the gene-editing platform to make crops ‘blind’ to the bioherbicide.

The key difference is that, unlike conventional transgenic herbicide-tolerant crops, this system does not introduce foreign genes. Instead, the crops are edited for improvements such as bioherbicide resistance and enhanced climate resilience. So they can be grown here in the UK! There are only a handful of eco-friendly and sustainable bioherbicides so I’m excited to develop this technology further.

The Research Associate role gives me a day a week to focus on the project, away from the lab, and a physical base in College. I’m incredibly grateful for it – it’s allowing me to do the things I’m doing now. The E-Lab looks for impact, and that very much aligns with my vision for my start-up and the technology I’m developing.

As well as helping with resources and knowledge, it’s great to be part of the E-Lab community – the other two RAs are also involved in start-ups, although in different sectors, and we’re all going through some challenges that are very specific to building a venture. Having the support system really helps and conversations with King’s Fellows at lunchtime are great – the other day I was talking to someone who knew all about the historical context of the broad bean and its part in the culinary culture of the Middle East. I learnt so much!

What has made you want to take your work out of the lab and into the world of entrepreneurship?

A few years ago I worked on a project in Nigeria and Ethiopia on the rehabilitation of the neglected legume crop of Africa, the African Yam Bean. It‘s drought-tolerant and produces high-protein beans and tubers and has great potential to help solve food insecurity within Africa.

Farmers were asking me about how they could grow plants that are adapted to increasingly extreme dry seasons, but there wasn’t sufficient funding to roll out the research – several stakeholders including major NGOs were surprisingly reluctant to put money into what’s regarded as a forgotten crop. I realised that there was a space for innovation here, that I could – and should – do something. We have the solutions in the lab – we can’t just keep them there.

In five years’ time, what would you like to have seen happen?

I’d like the technology to be out there, and being used. I really want it to benefit people. Ultimately, we need a solution to improving food security that benefits farmers, is good for the planet, and benefits the public who are eating these crops. I want to be part of that solution.

With thanks to all at the SLCU for facilitating this photo shoot.