electrically-driven ion release. Using both electrophysiological and biochemical approaches, Sanders was able to establish for the first time in plants that metabolites can act as triggers for release of calcium (a cellular signal) from vacuoles. Sanders established principles for biofortification of cereal crops with essential human mineral nutrients, and molecularly characterised calcium permeable channels. Sanders also discovered and characterised the first (and only) yeast calcium channel and demonstrated how cell marking can be used to distinguish cell types for patch clamp studies. Sanders also had influence in the investigation into the roles of plant cyclic nucleotide-gated channels that were explored at an early stage of discovery and resulted in a major collaborative publication with another lab demonstrating a key role in plant-bacterial symbiosis signalling. On top of his extensive discoveries, he has also written influential reviews on calcium signalling in plants, which have 3,300 combined citations on Google Scholar. To further his work on calcium channels, he then discovered that the TPC1 channel is the major pathway for ion exchange across plant vacuolar membranes. Their speculations that the TPC1 channel is involved in Calcium-induced calcium release were proven for the first time in plants in work from Sanders’ lab. He then established the principal molecular and cellular mechanisms for plant tolerance to manganese toxicity. Sanders has discovered the major mechanism of zinc accumulation in plant vacuoles, and more recently characterised the molecular properties of the transporter and showed how the transporter could be used for nutritional benefit for human consumption of cereal grains. On top of further collaborating with a Chinese lab to establish more generally the important role of zinc nutrition in rice. Sander’s current research focuses on how plant cells respond to changes in their environment and how they store the nutrients they acquire. In particular, his group work on how transport of chemical elements across cell membranes in plants is integrated with cellular signalling and nutritional status. Career Sanders' research career began at the Yale University School of Medicine, first as a postdoctoral research fellow (1978–79) and then as a postdoctoral research associate (1979–83). After a stint as a visiting research fellow in the University of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney (1983), Sanders moved into the biology department at the University of York in 1983, first as a lecturer (1983–89), a reader (1989–1992), a professor (1992–2010), also acting as the head of department (2004–2010). In