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Contact Details

Phone
+64 3 479 5149
Email
richard.macknight@otago.ac.nz
Position
Professor
Department
Department of Biochemistry
Qualifications
MSc PhD(Otago)
Research summary
Molecular genetics of plant development

Research

My research group is focused on understanding plant development, in particular on how flowering time is regulated and how seeds develop. We are currently using molecular-genetic approaches to:

  • Investigate the regulation of flowering in Arabidopsis and in the model legume, Medicago truncatula.
  • Identify and characterise imprinted genes.
  • Discover genes involved in Arabidopsis seed development.
  • Identification of genes for enhanced hybrid onion production.

Publications

Fakoya, A. O., Chen, A., Herridge, R. P., Macknight, R. C., & Brownfield, L. R. (2026). HapAsmbl: A reference-aided pipeline for assembling haplotypes in Nanopore amplicon sequence data of polymorphic populations. Applications in Plant Sciences, 14(3), e70062. doi: 10.1002/aps3.70062 Journal - Research Article

Perez Santangelo, S., & Macknight, R. C. (2026). FLOWERING LOCUS T genes MtFTb1 and MtFTb2 act redundantly to promote flowering under long days in Medicago truncatula. Plant Direct, 10(6), e70178. doi: 10.1002/pld3.70178 Journal - Research Article

Brown, H., McCallum, J., Johnston, P., Pither-Joyce, M., Macknight, R., Huth, N., … Wang, E. (2026). Integrating molecular and physiological approaches to quantify genetic controls for wheat development and improve phenotyping. Journal of Experimental Botany. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1093/jxb/erag278 Journal - Research Article

Hall, M., Mace, P., Macknight, R., & Brownfield, L. (2026, February). DeCOde: Understanding CONSTANS (CO) variation for flowering control in perennial ryegrass. Poster session presented at the Genetics Otago (GO) Annual Symposium, Dunedin, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Poster Presentation (not in published proceedings)

Herridge, R. P., Namburi, P., Varghese, S., Macknight, R. C., & Brownfield, L. R. (2026). A new breeding technique for F1 hybrid production from self-incompatible species. Plant Biotechnology Journal, 24(6), 4061-4063. doi: 10.1111/pbi.70632 Journal - Research Other

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