Edith Rebecca Saunders FLS (14 October 1865 – 6 June 1945) was a British geneticist and plant anatomist.

B. S. Haldane as the "Mother of British Plant Genetics",[1] she played an active role in the re-discovery of Mendel's laws of heredity, the understanding of trait inheritance in plants, and was the first collaborator of the geneticist William Bateson.

She continued to post-graduate research, and served as a demonstrator at the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women between 1888 and 1890 (where students from Newnham and Girton colleges received preparation for the Natural Sciences Tripos).

[4] She was appointed a fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society from which she received the Banksian Medal in 1906.

Many of her genetic experiments led to her and William Bateson defining important terms like "allelomorphs" (nowadays referred to as alleles), heterozygote and homozygote.