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Biography |
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Prof. Moemen S. Hanafy is a professor of plant Biotechnology at plant Biotechnology Department, National Research Centre (NRC), Egypt. As a DAAD alumni, he obtained his doctorate in Molecular Genetics from Plant Biotechnology Department, Hannover University, Germany in 2002 before moving to Sapporo, Japan, where he worked at National Agricultural Research Center for Hokkaido region on manipulation of the seeds amino acids using genetic engineering approach as a JSPS fellow (2003 – 2005).
In 2005 he joined Centre of Excellence for Advanced Science, National Research Centre (NRC) as a researcher of Plant Biotechnology and he shared Prof. M. Sakr (president of ASRT) in establishing Plant Molecular Genetics research group (2005 – 2008). Finally, he moved to Hannover, Germany, where he worked at Plant Biotechnology Department, Leibniz Universität Hannover on enhancement of abiotic stress tolerance of faba bean by heterologous expression of the PR10a gene from potato as Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) fellow (2008 – 2010). From January 2012 till June 2013 he worked as associate professor of plant biotechnology at faculty of science and humanities, Salman bin Abdul-Aziz University, KSA. Dr. Hanafy has over 20 years Experience in multidisciplinary laboratory and plant biotechnology research. Over the past 13 years, he developed plant Biotech research leading to about 21 research articles published in peer-reviewed international journals, four book chapters and about 15 invited presentations at national and international levels. He is a reviewer for research projects funded by ERA-Net ERAfrica program (EU fund). He is a member of some professional societies and currently serves on three editorial boards. In the last 8 years, Dr. Hanafy was granted two prizes; Prize of the president of the National Research Centre for best applied research, 2008 and National Research Centre Prize for scientific encouragement in biology, 2013. Recently, Dr. Hanafy got his professorship in plant biotechnology on March 2015.Recently, he is appointed to be an Ambassador Scientist of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Egypt from January 2016 to December 2018
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Abstract |
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Genetic Engineering of Grain Legumes for Improved Nutritive Value |
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Grain legumes in general are staple sources of protein for human and animal nutrition. Although soybeans represent the most important legumes crop worldwide, there are still problems relating to their nutritional value including deficiency of essential amino acids such as methionine and cysteine. Enhancing the nutritional quality of soybeans and faba bean could be achieved through increasing the concentration of nutritional essential amino acids and would further enhance their role as a raw material. So far enhancement of the amino acids accumulation could not be achieved by conventional breeding. Therefore, genetic engineering was employed by several research groups to resolve this problem. In general, three strategies have been employed. i) Engineering for increased free Met levels; ii) engineering of endogenous storage proteins with increased numbers of Met residues and iii) transfer of foreign genes encoding Met-rich proteins. From our experience, the first strategy turned out to be the most promising one. Plant transformation made it possible to express genes coding for mutant enzymes of the biosynthetic pathway of the nutritional important amino acids in the seeds of soybean. We are studying the expression of foreign genes involved in methionine (Met) and tryptophan (Trp) biosynthesis in transgenic soybean Glycine max (L.) Merrill, and azuki bean using Agrobacterium mediated transformation. Our results indicate that the overexpression of OASA1D from rice and AtCGS1 mto1-1 from Arabidopsis is a promising approach to enhance Trp and Met synthesis in grain legumes, respectively. |
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