The humble potato could help Sasha Eremina (Biochemistry PhD 2018) discover and deliver biological solutions to reduce the use of pesticides in food production.

Following a PhD exploring the biological perception of time, Sasha is now working to develop commercially viable products for planetary and human health.

Sasha’s present work at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, a centre for research into plant immunity, focuses on two concurrent projects. The first is to establish a product strategy and innovation pipeline for BioPotatoes, a spin-out company developing new, disease-resistant potato varieties. Her second, earlier-stage project focuses on manipulating RNA (ribonucleic acid, a molecule essential for most biological functions) to enhance and create bespoke plant immunity to pathogens.

Both projects involve substituting pesticides with genetics, which Sasha believes is increasingly important and cost-effective going forwards.

She says: “A lot of people want to synthesise biological alternatives to pesticides, but these still need spraying; what we’re working on are genetic solutions encoded in the seed, so the plants are programmed to detect pathogen attack and respond to it. It’s more difficult in terms of engineering and more costly, but also more sustainable because you don’t need to spray, and much more targeted because they utilise pathogen-specific responses and so don’t drive pathogen evolution.

“We are at the onset of an amazing revolution and transformation where, just as we have learned and are learning how to change molecular processes in humans and have revolutionised healthcare, we will learn how to programme plants, and this will make a massive difference to food and materials production across the globe.”

Sasha’s research pathway began with a summer internship as an Amgen Scholar studying protein biophysics at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Pharmacology in 2016, while an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Cambridge for her PhD at the Sainsbury Laboratory, studying the biology of time and the temporal control of biological processes (circadian rhythms).

“Biology has very few rules and many exceptions, so it’s really difficult to build some universal frameworks,” she says. For this reason she was captivated by time, which is “the one thing that almost every organism on Earth has the ability to perceive in some way and reflect in its biological processes”.

Through the examination of cyanobacteria, single-celled organisms that photosynthesise and therefore need to be aware of when the sun’s energy is available, Sasha’s PhD research developed insights into the balance between robustness and plasticity in an organism’s circadian rhythm. She advanced our understanding of how well these internal clocks can adapt to environmental changes (she offers being jetlagged from travelling between time zones as a human example of such a change) and her findings have been published in a recent paper. Although she focused on cyanobacteria, Sasha’s findings can provide insights into the circadian rhythms of all living things.

Sasha has always been driven towards finding meaningful applications for scientific advancements, and alongside her research she amassed experience in venture capital investment with venture builders such as Start Codon in Cambridge and Alix Ventures in San Francisco. Her current role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at The Sainsbury Laboratory follows her previous work with the same laboratory as a consultant from 2023 to 2024, when she helped to establish TSL-Ventures, a programme that supports scientists in developing their research into spin-out companies to tackle real-world problems relating to planetary and human health.

“There are so many global issues we can address with biology – I really believe that this is the century of biology-driven solutions for challenges ranging from health to climate to food,” Sasha says. “Biology is adaptive, abundant and sustainable. It is increasingly cost-effective. Being at the frontier of engineering biology provides us with opportunities to make a long-lasting positive impact on the world.”