[2] While still in school she read Edmund Beecher Wilson’s (1902) The Cell in Development and Heredity prompting an early interest in chromosomes.

She found Cambridge unsatisfying, in part because the university as a whole was not yet welcoming of women, and later went on to study with Gustaf Otto Rosenberg in Stockholm.

She had to apply for special permission to continue her PhD studies away from Cambridge when she obtained the position at Manchester.

The work with ferns addressed hybridisation, polyploidy, and apomixis and led to her 1950 book, Problems of cytology and evolution in the pteridophyta.

As well as engaging chromosomes for the purposes of evolutionary investigation, Manton carried out research into gross morphological structure using the ultraviolet microscope.

[8] Manton was a co-supervisor (with David Jennings) for then-PhD student Evan Benjamin Gareth Jones, who graduated in 1963 and later became a notable mycologist,[9] and of Patrick Brownsey, who became Curator of Botany at the National Museum of New Zealand.

[15][16] In 1990 the Irene Manton Prize for the best doctoral thesis in botany while registered at an academic institution in the UK was established by the Linnean Society.