Leonie Luginbuehl

Dr. Leonie Luginbuehl is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Plant Physiology and Symbiosis Group at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, a 450-million-year-old mutualism between plants and fungi that facilitates nutrient exchange while balancing carbon costs.

Her work integrates carbon tracing, transcriptomics, mutagenesis, and microscopy to identify molecular mechanisms regulating plant carbon allocation to fungi. She aims to engineer crops with optimized resource allocation, enhancing nutritional benefits while increasing soil carbon sequestration.

Key projects include the

• 2019 Cambridge Science Festival mycorrhizal home kit experiment
• Collaborations with Sainsbury Laboratory and Crop Science Centre
• Investigations of lipid transfer in plant-fungus interactions

Dr. Luginbuehl teaches IA Biology of Cells, IA Physiology of Organisms, and leads field courses to Portugal. She previously held postdoctoral positions at Cambridge and earned her PhD in Plant Molecular Biology from the John Innes Centre (2012-2017).

Scientific contributions include

• 2021 New Phytologist paper on chloroplast development
• 2020 Plant Direct work on fluorescent reporters in rice
• 2017 Science breakthrough on fatty acid synthesis in mycorrhizal fungi