Nicky is the senior postdoc in Alistair McCormick’s group in the Institute for Molecular Plant Sciences, University of Edinburgh. Nicky has been working for several years as part of a consortium entitled Combining Algal and Plant Photosynthesis (CAPP). The aim of this project is to engineer a CO2 Concentrating Mechanism (CCM) based on the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in a C3 plant for the first time. This involves first characterising the components required for biogenesis of the pyrenoid, a key structure in the Chlamydomonas CCM, and then secondly localising the components in the chloroplast of the higher plant Arabidopsis thaliana. A fully functional CCM would allow the concentration of CO2 around Rubisco, improving its efficiency and therefore plant growth. This mechanism could then be introduced to various crop plants to improve yield and contribute towards establishing food security. Nicky has also worked as part of an sLoLa consortium aiming to redesign the Chlamydomonas plastome as a testbed for applied synthetic biology.