Author Biographies

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Bhupendra Koul is a teacher and researcher, presently working as an Assistant Professor in the School of Bioengineering and Biosciences at the Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India. During his Ph.D., he worked on the introduction and expression of modified full-length and truncated versions of Bt-cry1Ab and cry1Ac genes in tomatoes for developing stable transgenic lines resistant to lepidopteran insects and evaluating the comparative performance of full-length and truncated versions of the cry1Ac gene for the stability and efficacy of insecticidal toxin in transgenic plants. In order to address this issue, the basic techniques of plant tissue culture, gene-cloning, Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, molecular characterization of transgene expression, and a population study of the transgenics, including immunological and insect bioassays, were performed. An efficient protocol of Agrobacterium-mediated genetic transformation in tomatoes for the rapid and high-frequency recovery of non-chimeric transgenic plants has been optimized. He has screened and selected a few highly promising transgenic events of tomato plants expressing modified Bt-cry1Ab and cry1Ac genes showing complete protection against H. armigera and S. litura. Several stable transgenic tomato plants resistant to plant pathogens through the expression of the protein transcription co-activator taf4b gene and chitinolytic protein toxic to whiteflies, using the optimized protocol, have also been developed.
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