Rachel Leech (3 June 1936 – 23 December 2017) was Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of York, UK.
She was also one of the early adopters of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model plant to identify the genes involved in chloroplast division.
Immediately before being awarded her doctorate in 1961, she spent 1959 - 60 at the Zoological Station in Naples supported by the Christopher Welch Scholarship from Oxford.
Her early work provided a method to isolate intact chloroplasts, which were needed to study how photosynthesis was co-ordinated, especially its essential requirement of transport of materials and electrons across a membrane.
[6] She initially showed that the current accepted method for chloroplast isolation resulted in significant contamination with mitochondria.
[10] This was an important step forwards in studying chloroplasts, especially their interactions with the rest of the cell and became the method used by many other research groups.
[3][2][11] Utilising the technical advances she had made, her research began to focus around the development of chloroplasts where the careful work of Leech and her collaborators again continued to be of importance into the twenty-first century.
[13] By the late 1980s Leech's research had begun to use Arabidopsis thaliana that was being adopted as a model plant across the scientific community.