The 9th International Conference on Agricultural and Biological Sciences (ABS 2023)

Biography: Dr. Hisayoshi Hayashi graduated from the University of Tsukuba in 1980. After working as an extension officer for a year in Nagano Prefecture he moved to Chushin Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES), where he was a member of the station’s department of field crop cultivation for six years. He then moved to the University of Tsukuba, where he is a professor and head of the Crop Science laboratories, now. He is the president of Japanese Society of Farm Work Research, too. His research focuses on the development and evaluation of sustainable, environmentally friendly production systems for both major crops and regional specialty crops. The effects of farm work on the human mind is one of his important research objectives, too.

Abstract: This oral keynote presentation will use wheat as an example by summarizing the research results from the last decade in the US Great Plains hard winter bread wheat in studying resistance to major diseases and pests, yield and its components, and end-use quality to illustrate how food security can be achieved through improving wheat production and crop resilience to climate change. QTL mapping, genome-wide association analyses, and genomic prediction and selection using SNPs from genotyping-by-sequencing and other sequencing platforms will be discussed. Major Alleles in popular wheat cultivars for improving wheat production and bread-making quality under both dryland and irrigated fields will be presented. High throughput phenotyping using UAS will be shown. In addition, the improvement of food safety, such as using host plant resistance to reduce vomitoxins and aflatoxins in wheat and corn will be discussed.

Biography: Dr. Shuyu Liu is a professor in wheat genetics and genomics with Texas A&M AgriLife Research-Amarillo and Dept of Soil and Crop Sciences of Texas A&M University. He worked as a visiting fellow at Agriculture Agri-Food Canada and a research scientist at Virginia Tech before he joined TAMU in 2010. He got his M.S. from Colorado State University and Ph.D. from University of Missouri-Columbia. He leads the wheat genetic program at Amarillo center and mainly focuses on genetic and genomic studies on important traits of wheat in the US Great Plains. Target traits include drought and heat tolerance, resistance to diseases (leaf, stem and stripe rusts, wheat streak mosaic virus), and arthropods (greenbug, Hessian fly, and wheat curl mite) as well as superior end-use quality for bread making. Both traditional and molecular breeding techniques are being used to develop germplasm lines with multiple target traits. Genomic techniques including gene/QTL mapping, target molecular marker identification, validation and utilization, diagnostic high throughput KASP SNP screening, gene cloning, and gene functional analysis are used to understand and improve those target traits. The established doubled haploid development is integrated to the traditional and molecular breeding pipelines in Texas. He got the research faculty award from Soil and Crop Science and a major member of a collaboration team from Vice Chancellor award in 2019 and Dean’s excellence award in 2015. He is leading a USDA-NIFA project as a PD and one as a Co-PD. He completed a USDA-NIFA-IWYP (International Wheat Yield Partnership) WheatCAP project as a co-PD and leads a collaborative project with hard winter wheat regional breeders and geneticists on doubled haploid development project funded by US wheat and Barley Scab Initiative. He also a co-PI for a subaward of WheaCAP in 2022-2027. He has secured $3.2M for his wheat genetic research and involved with $25M funding as a team member. He has published 93 peer reviewed publications and presented 112 oral and 136 posters. He has trained 15 Ph.D. and 13 M.S. students, and 20 undergraduate students. He has chaired 6 committees including plant genetic resources in the ASA-CSSA-SSSA tri-societies and joined 9 committees as a member. He is an ambassador of scientists engaging and educating decision makers and joined the virtual congressional visiting day in 2022. He has been an associate editor of five journals and reviewed >25 journal articles per year. He also got the outstanding reviewer award from the editor board of the Plant Genome in 2021.

Abstract: The study was carried out to determine the genetic diversity and population structure of a medicinal plant Grewia nervosa (Lour.) Panigrahi from two different regions of Sal forest, where one region (Cumilla) showed more abundance of G. nervosa than Sal plant and another region (Gazipur) showed relatively less abundancet. Coupled with these intents we were also interested to find out the best genotypes which can be chosen for breeding program. With these purposes 10 RAPD and 7 ISSR loci were used in the present investigation. We found populations from Cumilla Sal forest showed significantly higher polymorphism and comparatively higher heterozygosity than that of Gazipur, very low gene flow and high differentiation among the populations of Gazipur Sal forest but moderate gene flow and less differentiation of the populations of Cumilla Sal forest. Absence of pollinators, seed dispersal agents and difference in pollinating system are assumed to be the probable reason behind these types of population differentiation.

Keywords: abundance; genetic diversity, gene flow; population differentiation; environmental variables

Biography: Professor Dr. Ashfaque Ahmed has completed his B.Sc. (Hons.) and M.Sc. in Plant Ecology from the Department of Botany, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his MS in Natural Resource Management from Norway and PhD in Coastal Zone Ecology from the Department of Botany, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has been working on different aspects including species diversity, genetic diversity, phytoplankton diversity, soil and water quality assessment, Ecosystem health, C-sequestration and C-reserves of plants and soils, and soil respiration of different forest ecosystems of Bangladesh namely Sundarban mangrove forests and Deciduous forests, and uses of GIS techniques and Satellite images in resource assessment, forest health, change detection of land use patterns of different ecosystems including Bangladesh, India and Nepal. He has supervised more than 20 MS and MPhil students and 1 PhD student. Currently he is supervising 4 MS and 3 PhD students. He has published more than 35 articles in different renowned journals published from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Spain. He has been as the Executive Editor of Bangladesh Journal of Botany since 2021. He is currently holding the position of Secretary General of Bangladesh Botanical Society and Joint-General Secretary of Dhaka University Botany Alumni Association (DUBAA).